A couple of days ago, The Linux Foundation sat with representatives from big names in the IT world like Alibaba, ARM, Baidu, Google Cloud, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, Swisscom, and Tencent to announce the formation of the Confidential Computing Consortium, which is a community that is aimed at defining and expediting the adoption of confidential computing.
Talking about the new community, The Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin said in a press release, “The earliest work on technologies that have the ability to transform an industry is often done in collaboration across the industry and with open source technologies. The Confidential Computing Consortium is a leading indicator of what’s to come for security in computing and will help define and build open technologies to support this trust infrastructure for data in use.”
The Confidential Computing Consortium is expected to bring about a change by first uniting hardware vendors, cloud providers, developers, open source experts, and academics to create and expand the confidential computing market. After that, protection control for sensitive intellectual property and workload data can be finalised and applied. The key here is the standardisation in protection control.
According to The Linux Foundation, the current approaches in cloud computing address data at rest and in transit. However, encrypting data that is in use is the third and perhaps most difficult step to bringing about a fully encrypted lifecycle for sensitive data. According to The Linux Foundation, confidential computing “will enable encrypted data to be processed in memory without exposing it to the rest of the system and reduce exposure for sensitive data and provide greater control and transparency for users."