Skip to main content

Confidential Computing: the next frontier for data protection

Nick Vidal

Title: Confidential Computing: the next frontier for data protection
Author: Nick Vidal
Date: June 6, 2022

As organizations from different sectors move their computing workloads across multiple environments, from on-premises to public cloud to Edge, they require greater assurances that their sensitive code and data are protected.

There are three states in which data can be protected: at rest, in transit, and in use. Encrypting data at rest and in transit have become a common practice in cloud computing, while encrypting data in use (the core idea behind Confidential Computing) is still an emerging concern.

Enarx is a leading open source project part of the Confidential Computing Consortium that encrypts and provisions applications and data, providing a hardware-based solution to this need to maintain data confidentiality and integrity in use, regardless of who might own or have access to the host system on which the application is running. We plan to demonstrate how Enarx accomplishes this.

The Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC) is a project community at the Linux Foundation dedicated to defining and accelerating the adoption of confidential computing. It embodies open governance, open collaboration, and open source software.

As a member of the Confidential Computing Consortium and as a community manager of the Enarx project, I hope to demonstrate how Confidential Computing can help organizations - from sectors like healthcare, government & public sector, and human rights - to take advantage of the Cloud while still maintaining data confidentiality and integrity.

Source: RightsCon 2022

Link: https://www.rightscon.org/program/