Open Source Summit North America 2025

Software supply chain attack is an emerging threat for today’s enterprises. An attacker first gets an internal network access of the target enterprise, typically by using social engineering. Next the attacker gets administrator access to a software supply chain of the enterprise. Finally the attacker injects a backdoor into a built artifact and steals confidential information or digital assets from the enterprise, or even worse from customers.

A critical attack surface here is the administrator of the software supply chain. Confidential Containers is an open source project to protect containers from administrators by using trusted execution environments (TEEs). It protects a Kubernetes pod from a cluster administrator by running the pod inside of a TEE and validating the pod by remote attestation.

This talk presents a use case of Confidential Containers to protect a Tekton task. You will understand how Confidential Containers protects a task and artifacts even when the cluster administrator is compromised.

The ability to quickly observe and respond to security threats on remote machines is critically important for business and infrastructure, yet gaps still exist when applying cryptographic attestation solutions in real-world scenarios. Accessible policy generation, clear ways to understand attestation results, and methods for handling system updates need to be available to make remote attestation feasible. Adapting attestation best practices and tools to environments like edge and IoT, with vast scale requirements and limited network connectivity, can pose challenges as well.

Using the speakers’ experience working on open source projects Keylime (remote attestation) and flightctl (edge management), the session will walk through design considerations and challenges in bringing these tools together to monitor remote fleets of edge, IoT, and cloud-based systems at key points in the devices’ lifecycles. Further, the session will discuss remaining open problems as well as some potential solutions working toward the goal of usable, clear, and accurate attestation of remote systems.

For long time kexec was a faster way to reboot a machine without incurring delays caused by firmware and bootloaders. However for many applications even a kexec reboot still means significant service degradation, like disruption of the running guests in virtualized environments and the need to rebuild in-memory caches for large databases.

We propose Kexec HandOver (KHO) mechanism that allows serialization and deserialization of kernel data as well as preserving arbitrary memory ranges across kexec.

In addition, KHO keeps physically contiguous memory regions that are guaranteed to not have any memory that KHO would preserve, but still can be used by the system. The kexeced kernel bootstraps itself using those regions and marks all handed over memory as in use. KHO users then can recover their state from the preserved data. This includes memory reservations, where the user can either discard or claim reservations.