Switchboard SAIL

Switchboard SAIL is a generalized attestation environment that lets anyone run a Docker container inside an AMD SEV-SNP–secured TEE, without worrying about the underlying complexity.

SAIL builds on top of Kata Containers to deliver a turnkey VM image that launches your container with hardware attestation guarantees.

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Overview

Switchboard’s own oracles run inside AMD SEV-SNP–attested environments. SAIL generalizes this tooling so users can run any Docker container in an attested VM.

SAIL’s design goals:

• Simple user experience: "Bring your own Docker image"
• Strong AMD SEV-SNP attestation
• Verifiable outputs via attestation reports

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Architecture

• Base VM: Kata Containers for hardware-enforced isolation
• Attestation: AMD SEV-SNP
• Delivery: Prebuilt VM image (ISO) that boots into a "SAIL" environment
• Runtime flow:
  1. User specifies their Docker container image/tag
  2. VM boots and runs the user’s container
  3. Container includes the SAIL SDK + CLI to:
     • Expose an attestation endpoint
     • Generate attestation reports
  4. Reports can be verified against a public GitHub repo (verification flow to be finalized later)

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Features

✅ Lightweight VM isolation via Kata Containers
✅ AMD SEV-SNP attestation support
✅ User-defined Docker container
✅ SDK/CLI for attestation reporting

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Dynamic Container Selection

Previous work (by Lele) implemented a dynamic initd file in the Kata image to allow specifying which Docker container image/tag to boot, without recompiling the entire VM.

We plan to maintain and improve this approach so that:

• Users can set their desired container tag at deploy time
• The base image remains static for easier distribution and attestation

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Goals for this Milestone

We are focused on these deliverables first:

1. Base Image Delivery
   • Publish the ISO/VM image needed to boot SAIL
2. Setup Guide
   • How to download and start the VM
   • How to set the user’s Docker container image/tag
3. Example Flow
   • Running the user’s container
   • Generating an attestation report via the SDK/CLI

⚠️ The verification flow (checking reports against GitHub or other public infra) will be scoped and implemented later.

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Roadmap

✅ Build & release base image
✅ Dynamic container configuration (initd-based)
🟡 Write setup guide
🟡 Build example attestation flow
⬜ Define/implement public verification flow

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Contributing

We welcome help on:

• Improving the base image build
• Enhancing the initd dynamic container selection
• Writing documentation and setup guides
• Building the verification infrastructure

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References

• Nautilus:

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Contact

For questions or contributions, please open an issue or PR on this repo.