Confidential computing provides privacy protection during the storage process and provides end-to-end cloud data protections in combination with disc and network encryption and proprietary encryption keys.
Contents
What is Confidential Computing?
Confidential computing is a cloud-based system that isolates confidential data during computation in a secure CPU enclave. The material of the enclave – data processing and processing methods – is only available to a permitted code, and inaccessible and unknown for everyone, even the cloud provider.
Data protection in the cloud is important because businesses increasingly rely on public and hybrid cloud providers. The primary objective of secretive computing is to ensure businesses that their data in the cloud is safe and confident and to promote the transfer of greater sensitivities to public cloud providers with respect to their critical data and computing workloads.
Cloud vendors have provided security facilities for years for data protection at rest (in servers and databases) and transit data (moving over a network connection). Data confidentiality risk is eliminated from confidential computation by shielding data in usage — i.e. during compilation and execution.
How confidential computing works?
Before it can be processed by an application, data must be unencrypted in memory. This leaves the data vulnerable just before, during, and just after processing to memory dumps, root user compromises, and other malicious exploits.
Confidential computing solves this problem by leveraging a hardware-based trusted execution environment, or TEE, which is a secure enclave within a CPU. The TEE is secured using embedded encryption keys, and embedded attestation mechanisms that ensure the keys are accessible to authorized application code only. If malware or other unauthorized code attempts to access the keys – or if the authorized code is hacked or altered in any way – the TEE denies access to the keys and cancels the computation.
Sensitive data will therefore be kept secure in memory before TEE is informed by the program to decrypt it for processing. The data is invisible to the operating system (or a virtual hypervisor), other computer stack tools, and the vendor and its staff as it is decrypted and during the entire computing phase.
Why use confidential computing?
- To secure even during usage confidential data and increase the advantages of cloud computing to sensitive workloads. Used in conjunction with data encryption during the rest and transit, confidential computing removes the biggest hurdle from an inflexible and costly IT architecture in a more scalable and modern public cloud platform to the mobility of critical or heavily controlled data sets and application workloads.
- For the Protection of Intellectual property security. Confidential computing is not just for the security of information. In the TEE, patented organization logic, analytical features, machine learning algorithms or whole systems can be covered.
- Working securely on emerging cloud solutions for collaborators. For instance, one company may use the patented equations of another company to merge its confidential information with new solutions – without exchanging data or intellectual property.
- Remove problems when selecting cloud services. Confidential computing lets an organization choose a cloud computing provider that meets the technological and business needs most effectively, without caring about user information, proprietary technologies, and other confidential properties.
- To safeguard data on the edge. Edge computer is a distributed computing environment that connects business systems with sources of data, such as IoT devices or local edge servers. As it is used to secure the data and operation of edge nodes of sensitive computing as part of distributed cloud trends.
