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Wednesday, Oct 28, 2026 04:30pm - 05:30pm ET

Trust without a connection: layered security for disconnected mission compute

Oct 28, 2026

Abstract

Military, intelligence and critical infrastructure systems increasingly runAI and mission workloads at the edge. That means contested, disconnected, andphysically exposed environments where the usual cloud security assumptionsfail. You can't count on a reachable identity provider. You can't trust thehost operator. You can't patch on demand.

This talk is a case study in building a defense-in-depth model for thatenvironment. It follows the stack from the bottom up:

• Confidential computing. Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP isolate workloads even from a compromised host, and remote attestation verifies them.
• Software supply chain assurance. Immutable, signed OS images ship with SBOMs, continuous vulnerability scanning using Trivy and Grype, and STIG compliance reporting.
• Policy-as-code authorization. Cedar provides fine-grained, analyzable access control across compute, storage, networking and AI agents. Policies keep enforcing when the link to the enterprise is gone.
• Identity lifecycle. SCIM federates with enterprise directories without making them a runtime dependency.

We'll examine the design tradeoffs, the threat models behind each layer, andwhere the gaps remain. Examples are drawn from Mainsail's work on Starlight.