Currently, hardware provided by a provider is verified using a decentralized network of Auditors on Akash. While this approach is practical for a limited set of providers, the manual verification is proving challenging at scale, even more critical when incentives go onchain and are distributed without a human in the loop. Hardware Verification using Trusted Execution minimizes trust required to verify the accuracy of hardware provided by the providers on Akash network and serves as a fundamental building block for enabling Confidential Computing capabilities, as detailed in AEP-65.
The concept of virtual machines (VMs) for the Akash Network revolves around leveraging decentralized cloud computing resources to deploy, manage, and scale Virtual Machines securely and cost-effectively.
Public clouds (like AWS, Azure and GCP) support Confindential Computing because some customers request this before they agree to migrate workloads from their own DCs to public cloud infrastructure. While a vast majority of users don't ask the public clouds for this (and just blindly "trust" them) this is likely to become a challenge for Akash's growth particularly because infractstructure on Akash is owned by 10s if not 100s of independent providers.