FOSDEM 2023 (Hybrid) - Call For Participation :
Confidential Computing Devroom
(formerly Hardware-Aided Trusted Computing Devroom)

Submission deadline: December 2 2022

FOSDEM dates: February 4 & 5 2023

About FOSDEM

FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels. In 2023, they will again be able to meet in-person in Brussels. FOSDEM is free to attend. There is no registration.

Devroom overview and objectives

Following the success of the last years’ editions, we are for the 4th time organizing a devroom devoted to the emerging open source ecosystem around hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) which nowadays is also known under the term Confidential Computing (CC). Under TEEs, we understand architectures that allow to isolate and attest trusted “enclave” software components running on top of a potentially compromised operating system. Over the last years, all major processor vendors have developed some form of TEE support, e.g., Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX) and Trust Domain Extensions (TDX), ARM’s TrustZone and upcoming Confidential Compute Architecture (Arm CCA), AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and upcoming SEV-ES/SEV-SNP extensions, and IBM’s Protected Execution Facility (PEF).

Hence, with today’s mainstream consumer hardware being increasingly shipped with these advanced trusted computing technologies, this devroom wants to foster discussion on the much-needed open source confidential computing ecosystem amongst industry players, academics, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and project maintainers.

Desirable topics

The devroom’s topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Free and open source confidential computing.
    • An introduction to the existing solutions and the use cases they cover.
  • Programming frameworks for TEEs.
    • How to develop free and open source software that can run inside enclaves (e.g., Apache Teaclave, Enarx, Gramine-SGX libOS, Inclavare containers, Intel SGX-SDK, Linux kernel support for SEV/SGX/TDX, Occlum libOS, OpenEnclave SDK, Rust-EDP, SGX-LKL libOS, etc).
    • New frameworks or framework updates to the community.
    • Recent challenges (solved or appearing).
  • Attestation in confidential computing.
    • FOSS approaches to attestation.
    • Unifying attestation across different technologies.
  • Compiler and language support.
  • Free and open source enclave processor designs (e.g., RISC-V TEEs).
  • Applying Confidential Computing to the Cloud Native space.
  • Confidential Computing Deployment.
    • Challenges and benefits of confidential computing.
    • Use cases and applications.
  • TEE-specific attacks and defenses: reverse engineering, side-channels, vulnerabilities, exploits.
  • Vision: future TEEs (what is missed, proposals, wishes, discussions).
  • Confidential Computing and trust.
    • Where is my trust boundary? - Confidential VMs vs Confidential Pods vs Confidential Containers.
    • Trust and FOSS? What can I trust if I don’t trust anyone?

Old new rules: Back to Brussels but better?

For 2023, FOSDEM is once again planning an in-person event. However, it will also be possible to participate remotely. All talks presented live on the campus in Brussels will also be streamed. Additionally, some talks may be pre-recorded and broadcast online using the same matrix platform as in 2021 and 2022. Since we do not want to lose our remote audience that grew over the last years, we will split the confidential computing devroom into two parts, each a half-day:

  1. Saturday afternoon

    A purely online event where pre-recorded talks are followed by a live (online) Q&A. During this first half day we give the stage to existing or new projects in the space of confidential computing that want to present their work to the FOSDEM audience. This online part then also allows people to present at FOSDEM that cannot or want not come to Brussels in-person.

  2. Sunday afternoon

    We follow that part with the main (in-person) event where we focus on exciting and inciting topics in confidential computing. We will try to center this day on community building and attempt to hold some discussions and panel debates here. This in-person part is streamed and accessible to the remote audience but we acknowledge that remote attendees never really get the whole experience or as much say as the live audience when it comes to discussions.

In summary, the procedure will be as follows:

  • The reference time will again be Brussels local lime (CET).
  • This year there are two types of talks: Conventional in-person talks, and pre-recorded talks.
  • When submitting a proposal you must indicate whether you will be attending the main event in-person in Brussels, or cannot make it to the in-person event and would present via a pre-recording online. All talks will be accompanied by live text-based chat and moderated Q&A and discussion.
  • Conventional talks will be held at the confidential computing devroom in Brussels on Sunday afternoon and live streamed to the remote audience.
  • Pre-recorded, online, talks will be streamed during the first part of the devroom on Saturday afternoon. If your talk is selected, you can expect a recording deadline around January 9 so that we can fix all issues with videos 2 weeks before the event. During the stream of your talk, you must be available online for the Q&A session.
  • Q&A sessions for both talk formats will be taken live by the speaker, allowing the remote audience to ask questions via the matrix chat platform already used in the last years.

We had interesting discussions after the talks of last years, so we hope that the in-person format can give our community a big boost while we still accommodate our remote attendees from all over the world.

Key dates

  • Submission deadline: 02 December 2022
  • Announcement of selected talks: 07 December 2022
  • Deadline for the pre-recorded talks of the online day: Around 09 January 2023
  • Conference dates 4 & 5 February 2023 (hybrid)
  • Confidential computing devroom date:
    • Online part: Saturday 4 February 2023 (afternoon)
    • In-person part: Sunday 5 February 2023 (afternoon)

Submit a talk proposal

Submissions are required to proceed through the FOSDEM 2023 Pentabarf website. If you do not know how to use Pentabarf yet, you can read a beginner’s guide here.

Your submission must include the following information:

  • Your contact email.
  • The title (and possible subtitle) of your talk: please be descriptive, as the audience will have to choose to attend your talk out of a listing with ~500 talks from other projects at FOSDEM.
  • Select “Confidential Computing devroom” as the track.
  • We anticipate to mostly use the event type “Presentation” and maybe allow one or two “Discussion” style panel debates.
  • A short abstract of one paragraph.
  • A longer description if you wish to do so.
  • Links to related websites / blogs etc.
  • Please use the submission notes to let us know whether you can do an in-person talk or only a remote pre-recorded talk. Note that the main event is the physical devroom and we strongly encourage you to try to be there if possible.

You should target a talk duration of 20 minutes with 5 mins of live Q&A (leaves us with 5 mins buffer and change over for talks).

Contact and organizers

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to Fritz Alder (fritz.alder@kuleuven.be) or to any of the below co-organizers.