We've all seen the marketing slides. "Hardened enclave," "confidential computing," "memory-safe execution." But when you pull back the curtain on a lot of these deployments, especially in the cloud provider offerings, you're often looking at a strongly isolated container with a fancy attestation step. The hardware root of trust is real, but the threat model gets fuzzy.

This matters for us because IronClaw's integrity depends on these primitives. We're building agents that handle sensitive logic, and we're promised an enclave is a black box. But the known attack classes—cache timing, Spectre/Meltdown variants against the TEE, branch prediction—poke holes in that model. If the underlying "enclave" is just a fancy container, even NEAR AI's mitigations might be addressing the wrong layer.

I've been reviewing our `Cargo.toml` profiles and build flags. We're using `rustc` arguments for `-C target-feature=+aes,+ssse3` but the critical piece is ensuring the enclave SDK itself is compiled with mitigations on. For a simple Rust crate inside an Intel SGX enclave, are we checking the right things?

```toml
[profile.enclave-release]
opt-level = 's' # Optimize for size, can influence code layout
codegen-units = 1 # Improve locality
panic = 'abort'
```

My practical worry: we assess exposure at the application layer, but the vendor's enclave runtime or kernel could be the real side-channel surface. Has anyone done practical testing, like with `CacheBench` or similar, against our actual deployment targets? I'm less interested in theoretical vulns and more in what we can actually observe and harden against.

What's the group's experience? Are we putting too much faith in the "enclave" label?