The rise of LLM-as-a-Service and other confidential cloud workloads demands cryptographic proof that user data is processed in a trusted, untampered environment. Existing solutions, notably Confidential Containers (CoCo), enforce a strict "one Pod per VM" model that attests only the Guest OS stack, leaving container-level identity unverified and incurring prohibitive per-VM resource overhead. We present dstack-capsule, a Kubernetes platform that enables Pod-level remote attestation on Intel TDX by allowing multiple Pods to share a single Confidential VM while each retains independent, hardware-backed proof of identity. Our key insight is a two-layer attestation architecture: static platform measurements are frozen in RTMR[3] via an irreversible privilege fuse, while dynamic Pod identities (pod_uid, pod_spec_hash, workload_id) are embedded in the TDX Quote's report_data field and signed by hardware on every request. dstack-capsule introduces (1) a Pod-level attestation protocol binding Pod spec digests to hardware-signed Quotes; (2) a privilege fuse mechanism that atomically transitions a node from setup mode to secure mode; (3) a multi-layer sandbox spanning storage, runtime, admission, API, and network isolation layers; and (4) a complete open-source implementation based on Kubernetes 1.32, Intel TDX, and Sysbox. We evaluate the security properties, attestation correctness, and performance characteristics of dstack-capsule, demonstrating that it achieves Pod-granularity verification without the resource overhead of per-VM isolation.
Public agencies are beginning to consider large language models (LLMs) as decision-support tools for grant evaluation. This creates a practical governance problem: the model and scoring rubric should not be exposed in a way that allows applicants to optimize against them, yet the evaluation process must remain auditable, contestable, and accountable. We propose a TEE-based architecture that helps reconcile these requirements through remote attestation. The architecture allows an external verifier to check which model, rubric, prompt template, and input representation were used, without exposing model weights, proprietary scoring logic, or intermediate reasoning to applicants or infrastructure operators. The main artifact is an attested evaluation bundle: a signed, timestamped record linking the original submission hash, the canonical input hash, the model-and-rubric measurement, and the evaluation output. The paper also considers a scenario-specific prompt injection risk: applicant-controlled documents may contain hidden or indirect instructions intended to influence the LLM evaluator. We therefore include a canonicalization and sanitization layer that normalizes document representations and records suspicious transformations before inference. We position the design relative to confidential AI inference, attestable AI audits, zero-knowledge machine learning, algorithmic accountability, and AI-assisted peer review. The resulting claim is deliberately narrow: remote attestation does not prove that an evaluation is fair or scientifically correct, but it can make part of the evaluation process externally verifiable.