The whole point of Asylo is to provide a hardware abstraction layer to make applications portable across different enclaves; it's the opposite of reinforcing Intel's position.
That’s exactly the level of abstraction that we’re looking to provide in Asylo. The parent post linked to the asylo/identity/sgx directory, which contains SGX-specific implementations of some of our higher-level identity abstractions [1]. For instance, “EnclaveAssertionGenerator” defines an interface for generating attestations bound to an enclave’s identity, and “sgx::LocalAssertionGenerator” (an internal construct to our framework) provides that functionality for SGX.
[1] https://github.com/google/asylo/tree/master/asylo/identity
My main concern is not "reinforcing Intel's position" --- it could just as well be AMD, or ARM, or any other relatively tiny group of hardware manufacturers; the point is that everyone else is giving up and handing the ultimate control over their computing devices and the software they run to a small group, and that is most doubleplus ungood.
Yes, I shouldn't have conflated Asylo and SGX (or TEEs in general – where SGX is now dominant for the remote attestation model). The concern was with SGX, maybe even specifically to it being used together with other TEEs for ubiquitous DRM on consumer devices. Asylo could indeed drive competition in the case of remote attestation.
https://venturebeat.com/2017/07/16/ibm-z-mainframe-brings-en...
It looks to me that while Asylo is agnostic about the specific TEE used, it is primarily targeted at Intel SGX [1]. Instead of having to trust Google to run your code correctly and not read your data, you'd have to trust Intel to manufacture a secure enclave and essentially bake in a private key that cannot be read. You could use the public key to encrypt your code and workload, and it would run in a part of the processor that Google presumably cannot access (or measure [2]).
A good further introduction might be this paper [3] (especially the diagram on page 2), or this answer [4].
I'll repeat my main concern with this system: you will reinforce Intel's position as 'feudal lord' in this model [5].
[1] https://github.com/google/asylo/tree/master/asylo/identity/s...
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.08719
[3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/086.pdf
[4] https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/175749/what-are...
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15936121