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fitzthum / kbs-identity.md
Last active June 27, 2025 08:21
The Mystery of the KBS Identity

The Mystery of the KBS Identity

One simple question has confounded countless developers working on Confidential Containers; how do we know we are connecting to the correct KBS? For context, KBS is short for Key Broker Service, which is the trusted entity that conditionally grants access to client secrets. The term relying party could be used to describe the KBS. Inside the guest, there is a Key Broker Client (KBC) built into the Attestation Agent (AA). The KBC talks to the KBS to get container decryption keys among other things.

The connection between the KBC and the KBS is secured with public key cryptography. The KBC generates a random keypair and sends the public key to the KBS when requesting confidential resources. Since the KBC has the lifespan of one VM, it makes sense for it to have an ephemeral keypair. The hash of the public key is includ