Intel · Meta · AMD · The Register
Confidential computing's core trust mechanism is broken
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Attested TLS: the handshake that can't prove who's on the other end.
Key facts
- The responsible disclosure resulted in CVE-2026-33697, rated 7.5 on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System, high severity
- The CCC Attestation SIG's repository lists CVE-2026-33697 as the highest-scoring vulnerability among a cluster of recent confidential computing flaws, ahead of Fabricked (5.9), BreakFAST (5.9)
- The attacks apply to every version of Cocos AI between 0.4.0 and 0.8.2
- Their recent paper, Identity Crisis in Confidential Computing, published with co-authors Mariam Moustafa and Tuomas Aura and presented at the AsiaCCS 2026 conference, found diversion attacks
Summary
Vendors are trying to position "confidential computing" as the technical backbone of Europe's sovereign cloud ambitions. Confidential computing rests on a mechanism called remote attestation, in which a server cryptographically proves to a client that it is running inside a genuine, unmodified Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) before any sensitive data changes hands. In May, The Register reported that the chip beneath the chip, the management engines running below the operating system on Intel and AMD silicon, falls outside what European sovereignty frameworks like SecNumCloud assess. New, independently verified research answers it, and the answer is not reassuring. Muhammad Usama Sardar, a researcher at TU Dresden, has spent the past two years formally verifying whether that protocol, known as attested TLS, does what it claims.