Attestation

In security, an attestation is a cryptographic statement from a system about its own configuration, signed by hardware or a trusted party. Increasingly required for high-trust AI deployments.

Two flavors of attestation

The word "attestation" carries two distinct meanings in vendor procurement. Audit attestation is a formal statement by an independent auditor (CPA firm for SOC 2, ISO certification body for ISO 27001) that the vendor's controls operate effectively. Cryptographic attestation is a runtime signature from hardware proving that a specific code and configuration is executing inside a TEE.

Both are forms of "trust through external verification" but they answer different questions: audit attestation tells you what the vendor's controls look like at audit time, cryptographic attestation tells you what is running right now on the specific machine handling your request.

For AI procurement

Audit attestations (SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HITRUST) are minimum-bar diligence for any enterprise AI procurement. Cryptographic attestations from TEEs are emerging as a stronger guarantee for deployments handling regulated data — the buyer receives a chain of signatures proving the AI workload running on the cloud is the one they expect, not a substituted or modified version.

What to ask

For audit attestation: which reports, what scope, what audit period, who was the auditor, can you provide a copy under NDA. For cryptographic attestation: what TEE platform, what attestation protocol (Intel SGX quotes, AMD SEV reports, Nitro Enclave attestation documents), what's in the report (PCR values, measurements), and how do you verify the chain of trust back to a hardware root.