Replication Failures in TDX-Confidential VM due to OS Incompatibility and Missing Dependencies

Abstract

Reproducibility is essential to scientific research, but many published replication packages associated with research papers are undocumented, fragile, and even incompatible across various computing environments. This project focuses on evaluating whether confidential computing, specifically Intel’s Trusted Domain Extensions (TDX), can support secure and reliable replication of academic research papers. In this project, three recent Management Science studies were tested in a TDX-enabled confidential virtual machine on Microsoft Azure, but many technical barriers were faced. One package broke under a Waf-based build system with file handling errors. Another was blocked by a missing dataset (Hotels_MW.dta) with no author response. The final one relied on a Windows-only R package containing .dll binaries which made it unusable in a Linux-based confidential virtual machine. Despite immense efforts to troubleshoot these problems such as symbolic linking, environment configuration, and script rewrites, the replication packages could not be run for these papers, which highlights the necessity for platform-agnostic design, complete data sharing, and avoidance of OS-specific dependencies.