WHAT IS EC2 INSTANCE ATTESTATION

Summary from the TLDR InfoSec newsletter

Nitro enclaves were introduced in 2020 to provide a trusted execution environment for security-sensitive applications. However, application development was more complex due to the execution environment's limitations. Last year, AWS launched EC2 instance attestation, which extends the security enclave to the full instance, enabling more use cases and improving usability at the cost of greater effort to secure the instance and increased deployment complexity. This post walks through the process of creating an application running on an EC2 instance with attestation, including a GitHub Actions workflow to build a hardened, attestable AMI.