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2023

Dec 15

CCC Newsletter – October/November 2023

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Welcome to the October/November 2023 edition of the Confidential Computing Consortium newsletter! We look forward to sharing every month news about projects underway, new members, industry events and other useful information to keep you updated with what’s happening at the consortium.

Linux Foundation Member Summit

The Linux Member Summit is for leadership of the Linux Foundation, LF projects and major open source initiatives.  This year it was held in Monterey, California, and Mike Bursell (Executive Director) and Stephen Walli (out-going Chair of the Governing Board) attended and delivered a session entitled 50+ companies, 500+ opinions: Aligning Activities with Member Priorities, discussing the history of the CCC, the challenges and opportunities presented by its diverse membership and the approaches being taken to mitigate and capitalise on them.  The model of minimum-viable governance received a number of questions from the audience and engagement after the session.

A small number of governing board members also met in person for a GB meeting (with others attending virtually), and there were also discussions with existing members, potential members and other projects (Linux Foundation and others) with a possible overlap with Confidential Computing (such as the Linux Foundation’s Digital Trust project).


Privacy-Enhancing Technologies Summit

In November, the CCC was associate sponsor for the PET Summit Singapore, curating the first morning of a two day conference (agenda).  Mike Bursell (Executive Director) moderated the initial session of the conference, introducing Privacy-Enhancing Technologies in general and talking to experts from a variety of backgrounds. Richard Searle of Fortanix then moderated another session, looking particularly at Confidential Computing and the impact it is having on industry today, followed by presentations by Vikas Ujjwal Kumar (Lead Architect
Microsoft Technology Centre APAC, Singapore) and Ayush Batra (Regional CTO, Intel). Mike closed out the morning with a presentation about Confidential Computing and the work of the CCC.

The rest of the conference looked at various PETs, situating them strongly within a business context, and with strong representation from local agencies and organisations.  Notable was the focus on the importance of focussing on the problem that PETs solve, rather than looking for solutions that a particular technology might address.  The IMDA (Singapore’s technology hub and regulator) was the other major sponsor and runs “sandbox” projects to identify and solve issues with the use of PETs: they are very interested in projects from members of the CCC.

This conference was an opportunity for the CCC to execute on its strategy of expanding engagement in the Asia Pacific region and led to interest in membership and collaboration with various organisations, as well as the opportunity to meet in person with several existing members.

Thanks,
The Confidential Computing Consortium

Dec 04

O’Reilly Media report: Azure Confidential Computing and Zero Trust

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At the Confidential Compute Consortium, we’re committed to fostering a secure and privacy first digital future. The recently published O’Reilly Media report: Azure Confidential Computing and Zero Trust echoes the growing importance of safeguarding sensitive data across industries.
The Confidential computing Consortium stands at the forefront of this movement, championing a paradigm shift towards fortified data protection. This report underlines the non-negotiable aspect of privacy and security in our digital world. The insights shared in the O’Reilly Media report reinforce the urgency and relevance of our endeavors. By championing confidential computing, we’re reshaping the narrative, driving innovation, and setting new benchmarks for data security and privacy standards.

Oct 03

CCC Newsletter – August/September 2023

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Welcome to the August/September 2023 edition of the Confidential Computing Consortium newsletter! We look forward to sharing every month news about projects underway, new members, industry events and other useful information to keep you updated with what’s happening at the consortium.

Confidential Computing Mini Summit

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 | 13:30 – 17:00

Location: Euskalduna Bilbao
In Person Registration Cost: $10
Virtual Registration Cost: $0

Confidential Computing protects data in use by performing computation in a hardware-based, attested Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). The Confidential Computing is bringing together hardware vendors, cloud providers, and software developers to accelerate the adoption of TEEs through collaboration in open source software.

Agenda:

Event Details

Date: Monday, September 18, 2023 

Time: 13:30 – 17:00 CEST

Agenda: https://osseu2023.sched.com/event/1Our5

Location: Euskalduna Conference Centre, Level 5, Room 5A, map.

Joining Sessions Virtually

All mini summit sessions will be streamed live on the Linux Foundation YouTube Channel. There will be no virtual platform for this event. For more information on how to join sessions virtually, please visit our Virtual Attendance webpage. Please note: Virtual attendees will only be able to watch the live session – there will be no speaker Q&A and no virtual attendee audio function. However, chat will be enabled on the YouTube live stream.

Session Recordings

The mini summit will be recorded and posted to the Linux Foundation YouTube channel 2 weeks after the event.

Recap of Diana Initiative

By Deirdre Cleary

The Diana Initiative (TDI) is a conference whose aim is to help those underrepresented in Information Security and this year’s event took place on August 7th at the Westin in Las Vegas. I was sponsored by Evervault to attend and give a talk entitled Spilling the TEE.

This was my first time attending and I found The Diana Initiative to be a really welcoming environment for newcomers. The day offered a mix of talks, workshops, and hands-on villages, all of which built on this year’s theme of Lead the Change. The conference is well-timed at the start of Hacker Summer Camp and leaves attendees feeling confident in themselves and their abilities as they take on the many other events the week has to offer.

As a speaker, I gave a 30-minute talk entitled Spilling the TEE. The session was aimed at those who had no previous experience with Trusted Execution Environments, but were curious to learn what they’re all about. I discussed why we need TEEs, the features they offer, the types of TEEs available today, and gave some examples of applicable use cases.

One use case we dove into a little deeper was that of rebuilding trust in period tracking apps. Post Roe v. Wade there was a lot of discussion about whether it is safe to be sharing this very personal data with apps on your phone, having little knowledge of, or control over, what the data can be used for. At TDI I explored how TEEs could be part of the solution. In combination with open sourcing, TEEs can offer users confirmation of exactly what actions are being performed on their data, thanks to attestation. I demonstrated this using Evervault’s open source project (Cages)[https://github.com/evervault/cages] to deploy a simple attestable period prediction tool on (AWS Nitro Enclaves)[https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/nitro/nitro-enclaves].

While this is not the typical example we give for TEEs, it resonated well with the attendees on the day, and goes to show that the more diverse the people involved in confidential computing, the more diverse the solutions we can build together.

Resources:

Slides

Video

Recap of DEFCON

By Nick Vidal

On Friday and Saturday August 11-12, I attended DEFCON, the largest hacker conference in the world, held across 3 different Caesars’ convention centers, with over 30,000 attendees. The conference is so big that they have to split it into what they call villages, which are still very large on their own. I spent most of my time in the following villages:

IoT Village

The CCC was sponsoring the IoT Village. This was a very well attended village, and I was surprised by the enthusiasm and knowledge of the attendees. Many arrived early in the morning, and only left the large room late in the afternoon, spending their time trying to break into IoT devices. Many thanks to the IoT Village organizers who received me, Rachael Tubbs and Sara Pickering, MS, PHR, SHRM-CP.

AI Village

The AI Village was one of the most popular ones, and was dedicated to DARPA’s AI Cyber Initiative. Thousands of hackers tried to find vulnerabilities in Large Language Models. This initiative was officially announced at the main auditorium:

DARPA Announces an AI Cyber Initiative – by Dave Weston, Vice President of Enterprise and OS Security at Microsoft; Heather Adkins, Vice President of Security Engineering at Google; Matthew Knight, Head of Security at OpenAI; Michael Sellitto, Head of Geopolitics and Security Policy at Anthropic; Omkhar Arasaratnam, General Manager at the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF); and Perri Adams, AixCC Program Manager at DARPA.

Policy@DEFCON

The Policy@DEFCON room was also well attended, and brought together government officials and specialists interested in safeguarding critical infrastructure, with a particular focus on open source software security. I really liked Kemba Walden’s fireside chat with Jeff Moss at the main auditorium:

Fireside Chat with the National Cyber Director Kemba Walden – by Kemba Walden, Acting National Cyber Director at the Office of the National Cyber Director, the White House; Jeff Moss, Founder of DEFCON.

Crypto & Privacy Village

The Crypto & Privacy Village is one of my favorites, and last year we gave two talks there. This time, I was only attending. I especially enjoyed the entertaining privacy talk from Anthony about how privacy laws are evolving in the U.S.:

Is 2023 the Year of Privacy: How History and States are Posed to Change Privacy? – by Anthony Hendricks

Resources:

Full Article

Thanks,
The Confidential Computing Consortium

Aug 02

Confidential Computing Mini Summit at OSS EU in Bilbao

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We’re delighted to announce that the Confidential Computing Consortium is hosting a Mini Summit co-located with Open Source Summit Europe in Bilbao in September.  The Mini Summit will take place during the afternoon of Monday, 18th September, the day before the main OSS EU conference. 

Call for Proposals for the Confidential Computing Mini Summit are open! We welcome submissions on any relevant content to present at this summit. Submit your proposal here!

Important Dates:

  • CFP deadline: Aug 13, 2023
  • Speaker notification: Aug 18, 2023

Session type:

  • 30 min session

Topic area:

  • Use case deep dive
  • EU open source project & communities
  • (Open) Surprise us with a hot topic!

It’s a great opportunity to meet other members of the community, hear sessions from leaders in the industry and enjoy a little more time in Spain!  In-person registration is just $10 to your existing OSS EU ticket, and virtual registration is free.  We look forward to seeing you there!

More details are available at https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-summit-europe/features/co-located-events/#confidential-computing-mini-summit

Jul 24

Latest SUSE Linux Enterprise goes all in with confidential computing

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SUSE’s latest release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 5 (SLE 15 SP5) has a focus on security, claiming it as the first distro to offer full support for confidential computing to protect data.

According to SUSE, the latest version of its enterprise platform is designed to deliver high-performance computing capabilities, with an inevitable mention of AI/ML workloads, plus it claims to have extended its live-patching capabilities.

The release also comes just weeks after the community release openSUSE Leap 15.5 was made available, with the two sharing a common core. The Reg’s resident open source guru noted that Leap 15.6 has now been confirmed as under development, which implies that a future SLE 15 SP6 should also be in the pipeline.

SUSE announced the latest version at its SUSECON event in Munich, along with a new report on cloud security issues claiming that more than 88 percent of IT teams have reported at least one cloud security incident over the the past year.

This appears to be the justification for the claim that SLE 15 SP5 is the first Linux distro to support “the entire spectrum” of confidential computing, allowing customers to run fully encrypted virtual machines on their infrastructure to protect applications and their associated data.

Confidential computing relies on hardware-based security mechanisms in the processor to provide this protection, so enterprises hoping to take advantage of this will need to ensure their servers have the necessary support, such as AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) and Intel’s Trust Domain Extensions (TDX).

SUSE also said that its cut of SLE for running SAP applications comes with improvements in High Availability (HA) and speedier deployment thanks to enhanced automation in SP5. These include automatic discovery of servers, SAP HANA databases, SAP S/4HANA, and NetWeaver applications and clusters, plus continuous checks on HA configurations with recommended fixes.

On the management side, the SUSE Manager 4.3.6 tool is now claimed to support over 15 different Linux distributions, including Rocky Linux, Alma Linux and all variations of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, in addition to SUSE’s own platform.

SUSE said that this will be available in the AWS marketplace on a pay-as-you-go basis later this year, allowing customers to manage their infrastructure from the cloud with a scalable instance on a metered basis.

While not strictly part of SLE, SUSE said it has added security-focused updates to its Rancher platform for managing Kubernetes and containers, such as support for hardened virtual machines and improved vulnerability and compliance management. The premium version, Rancher Prime, is getting the inevitable overhaul of its built-in AI Assistant with OpenAI and other generative AI technologies, since why not?

There is also a new release of its container security tool, with NeuVector 5.2 adding updates for common vulnerabilities, exposure database search, and NIST 800-53 report mapping.

NeuVector will apparently be available on the AWS Marketplace from July, and SUSE said it will also be available on Azure and Google Cloud later this summer.

“Every enterprise must maximize their business resilience to face increasingly sophisticated and potentially devastating digital attacks,” SUSE CTO Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo said. ®

Jul 24

VMware, AMD, Samsung and RISC-V push for confidential computing standards

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VMware has joined AMD, Samsung, and members of the RISC-V community to work on an open and cross-platform framework for the development and operation of applications using confidential computing hardware.

Revealing the effort at the Confidential Computing Summit 2023 in San Francisco, the companies say they aim to bring about an industry transition to practical confidential computing by developing the open source Certifier Framework for Confidential Computing project.

Among other goals, the project aims to standardize on a set of platform-independent developer APIs that can be used to develop or adapt application code to run in a confidential computing environment, with a Certifier Service overseeing them in operation.

VMware claims to have researched, developed and open sourced the Certifier Framework, but with AMD on board, plus Samsung (which develops its own smartphone chips), the group has the x86 and Arm worlds covered. Also on board is the Keystone project, which is developing an enclave framework to support confidential computing on RISC-V processors.

Confidential computing is designed to protect applications and their data from theft or tampering by protecting them inside a secure enclave, or trusted execution environment (TEE). This uses hardware-based security mechanisms to prevent access from everything outside the enclave, including the host operating system and any other application code.

Such security protections are likely to be increasingly important in the context of applications running in multi-cloud environments, VMware reckons.

Another scenario for confidential computing put forward by Microsoft, which believes confidential computing will become the norm – is multi-party computation and analytics. This sees several users each contribute their own private data to an enclave, where it can be analyzed securely to produce results much richer than each would have got purely from their own data set.

This is described as an emerging class of machine learning and “data economy” workloads that are based on sensitive data and models aggregated from multiple sources, which will be enabled by confidential computing.

However, VMware points out that like many useful hardware features, it will not be widely adopted until it becomes easier to develop applications in the new paradigm.

Cutting effort

The cloud and virtualization giant claims that this is the purpose of the Certifier Framework, which provides platform-independent support for specifying and enforcing trust policies to secure workloads across on-premises and third-party infrastructure, including multi-cloud environments, while the companies will work together on a set of developer APIs across the x86, Arm and RISC-V ecosystems.

According to VMware, the Certifier Framework comprises two parts: one is an application development library (the API) that allows a developer to either port an existing “well-written” application, or develop a fresh one with minimal effort.

The API is said to support multiple confidential computing platforms, so there is no need to rewrite an application that uses the Framework when moving to another platform, it is claimed, and porting an app to a confidential computing environment may only require “half a dozen or so calls to the API.

Open source project

The second part of the framework is the Certifier Service, made up of a number of server applications that evaluate policy and manage trust relationships in a security domain. The purpose of this Certifier Service is to provide a scalable means to deploy many confidential computing applications and enforce security policy.

The group says showed off the technology at the Confidential Computing Summit, including demos of “universal” client-cloud trust management across multiple hardware platforms.

Intel is notably absent from the Certifier Framework group, despite being a premier member of the Confidential Computing Consortium and sponsor of the Confidential Computing Summit itself.

However, AMD’s Raghu Nambiar, VP for Data Center Ecosystems and Solutions, said that working with industry players such as VMware is critical for boosting adoption of confidential computing.

“No matter the size or technical sophistication of an organization, or where a workload is deployed, the Certifier Framework will help more customers realize the benefits of confidential computing,” he said in a statement.

Yong Ho Hwang, Samsung Electronics VP and Head of Security and Privacy, also endorsed it, adding: “We are pleased to be a supporter of the Certifier Framework and share the common goal of accelerating the adoption of confidential computing through a developer-friendly API for confidential computing trust management.”

Readers interested in the initiative can have a look at the Certifier Framework for Confidential Computing on Github. ®

Jul 24

Broad industry representation at Confidential Computing Summit

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On Thursday, 29th June 2023, the first Confidential Computing Summit was held at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco.  Organized by Opaque Systems and the Confidential Computing Consortium, it comprised 38 sessions delivered by 44 speakers and panelists, with 244 attendees – over twice the expected number.  Although initially planned as a single track event, the number of responses to the Call for Papers was so large that the agenda was split into three tracks, with keynotes starting and ending the event.

Sessions covered a broad range of topics, from state of the industry and outlook, to deep-dive technical discussions.  One of the key themes of the Summit, however, was the application of Confidential Computing to real-life use cases, with presentations by end users as well as suppliers of Confidential Computing technologies.  The relevance of Confidential Computing to AI was a recurring topic as data and model privacy is emerging as a major concern for many users, particularly those with requirements to share data with untrusted parties whether partners or even competitors for multi-party collaboration.  Other use cases included private messaging, anti-money laundering, Edge computing, regulatory compliance, Big Data, examination security and data sovereignty.  Use cases for Confidential Computing ranged across multiple sectors, including telecommunications, banking, insurance, healthcare and AdTech. Sessions ranged from high-level commercial use case discussions to low-level technical considerations.

There was an exhibitor hall which doubled as meeting space and included booths from the CCC and Opaque Systems plus the Summit’s premier sponsors (Microsoft, Intel, VMware, Arm, Anjuna, Fortanix, Edgeless Systems, Cosmian).  The venue also had sufficient space (and seating with branded cushions!) for a busy “hallway track”.  For many attendees, the ability to meet other industry professionals in person for the first time was as valuable a reason to attend the Summit as the session – while virtual conferences can have value, the conversations held face-to-face at the conference provided opportunities for networking that would have been impossible without real-world interactions.

Videos of many of the sessions will be made available on the conference website in the coming weeks: https://confidentialcomputingsummit.com/ (the agenda of sessions presented is also available).

The Confidential Computing Consortium would like to thank Opaque Systems and the program committee for their hard work in organizing this event.  Given the success of the Summit, plans are already underway for a larger instance next year.  Please keep an eye on this blog and other news outlets for information.  We look forward to seeing you there!

Jul 24

CCC Newsletter – June/July 2023

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Welcome to the June/July 2023 edition of the Confidential Computing Consortium newsletter! We look forward to sharing every month news about projects underway, new members, industry events and other useful information to keep you updated with what’s happening at the consortium.

Confidential Computing Summit: Broad industry representation

On Thursday, 29th June 2023, the first Confidential Computing Summit was held at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco.  Organized by Opaque Systems and the Confidential Computing Consortium, it comprised 38 sessions delivered by 44 speakers and panelists, with 244 attendees – over twice the expected number.  Although initially planned as a single track event, the number of responses to the Call for Papers was so large that the agenda was split into three tracks, with keynotes starting and ending the event.

Sessions covered a broad range of topics, from state of the industry and outlook, to deep-dive technical discussions.  One of the key themes of the Summit, however, was the application of Confidential Computing to real-life use cases, with presentations by end users as well as suppliers of Confidential Computing technologies.  The relevance of Confidential Computing to AI was a recurring topic as data and model privacy is emerging as a major concern for many users, particularly those with requirements to share data with untrusted parties whether partners or even competitors for multi-party collaboration.  Other use cases included private messaging, anti-money laundering, Edge computing, regulatory compliance, Big Data, examination security and data sovereignty.  Use cases for Confidential Computing ranged across multiple sectors, including telecommunications, banking, insurance, healthcare and AdTech. Sessions ranged from high-level commercial use case discussions to low-level technical considerations.

There was an exhibitor hall which doubled as meeting space and included booths from the CCC and Opaque Systems plus the Summit’s premier sponsors (Microsoft, Intel, VMware, Arm, Anjuna, Fortanix, Edgeless Systems, Cosmian).  The venue also had sufficient space (and seating with branded cushions!) for a busy “hallway track”.  For many attendees, the ability to meet other industry professionals in person for the first time was as valuable a reason to attend the Summit as the session – while virtual conferences can have value, the conversations held face-to-face at the conference provided opportunities for networking that would have been impossible without real-world interactions.

Videos of many of the sessions are available on the conference website: https://confidentialcomputingsummit.com/ (the agenda of sessions presented is also available).

The Confidential Computing Consortium would like to thank Opaque Systems and the program committee for their hard work in organizing this event.  Given the success of the Summit, plans are already underway for a larger instance next year.  Please keep an eye on this blog and other news outlets for information.  We look forward to seeing you there!

– Mike Bursell, Executive Director of the CCC

Upcoming Events

Thanks,
The Confidential Computing Consortium