Properties

Trust Properties

TEE attestation lets a client check that the Notary is running in an Intel TDX environment and that the TDX quote is bound to the Notary public key exposed by /info.

Compared with a non-TEE Notary, the client no longer has to rely only on service identity and operator claims. The client can verify hardware-backed evidence for the environment that produced the extra TDX attestation payload.

The design still trusts the Intel TDX trust chain, Intel Trust Authority evidence, the expected Notary binary or deployment policy, and the verifier's local policy configuration.

Privacy Properties

The TEE is intended to reduce what the host operator can learn or tamper with while the Notary runs. TLSNotary's normal transcript privacy model still applies: clients disclose only the committed and revealed portions required by the proof flow.

The deployment can still reveal metadata such as IP addresses, timing, request sizes, target hostnames, and whether a session requested TEE attestation.

The TDX evidence itself is not private. It is meant to be shared with verifiers and may include measurements, policy-relevant fields, and report data binding the quote to the Notary key.

Security Properties

• Integrity: verifiers can reject evidence that does not match the expected TDX trust chain or deployment policy.
• Authenticity: the Notary public key is sent as Trust Authority user data, so clients can compare extracted report data against the public key returned by /info.
• Session behavior: teeAttestation: true is stored per session, and the Notary emits the extra TDX attestation message during /notarize.
• Isolation: TDX reduces exposure to the host environment, subject to the hardware, firmware, and Trust Authority assumptions.

Non-Goals And Limitations

TEE attestation does not prove that the remote target server behaved honestly, does not hide network metadata, and does not replace standard TLS certificate validation or TLSNotary verification.

Operational mistakes can still break trust: wrong Trust Authority config, missing tee_quote, ephemeral Notary keys where clients expect pinning, or verifier policy that accepts the wrong measurement.