Welcome to the March 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.
New Members
Canonical
Canonical joined the CCC in the prior month, and now they’ve published a blog post:
https://canonical.com/blog/canonical-joins-the-confidential-computing-consortium
Suse
Suse has recently joined the CCC and they have also published a blog post:
https://www.suse.com/c/suse-joins-the-confidential-computing-consortium/
Customers and partners rely on SUSE to deliver a secure, open source platform that fully protects data regardless of its state. Confidential Computing safeguards data in use without impacting business-critical workloads. Joining the Confidential Computing Consortium enables SUSE to collaborate with open source leaders to advance these security technologies for our customers.
Recent Events
FOSS Backstage
The Confidential Computing Consortium participated at FOSS Backstage that took place in Berlin on March 13-14. CCC Outreach Chair Nick Vidal gave a talk about combining open source supply chain technologies like SBOMs and Sigstore with Confidential Computing. The presentation was very much inspired by the SLSA security framework, where the major threats are highlighted in each stage of the supply chain. Interestingly enough, currently SLSA does not cover much of the last mile of the supply chain, when the application/workload is actually deployed, and this is where Confidential Computing can play an important role. The video recording is available here:
https://program.foss-backstage.de/fossback23/talk/ZMCST7/
OC3
On March 15th , for the third year in a row, the Open Confidential Computing Conference (OC3) brought the confidential computing community together to discuss latest developments, use cases, and projects. The event was hosted by Edgeless Systems, and proudly sponsored by the Confidential Computing Consortium, amongst others. There were 29 sessions with 37 expert speakers from Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, IBM, AMD, Suse and many more. 1227 people registered across industries from all over the world. The recordings are available on Edgeless Systems YouTube channel on demand.
You can find Ben Fischer keynote on behalf of the CCC here:
A CTO panel with Greg Lavender, Mark Russinovich, Mark Papermaster and Ian Buck is available here:
Webinar:
Dan Middleton, CCC TAC Chair and principal engineer at Intel, and Dave Thaler, former CCC TAC Chair and software architect at Microsoft, shared their work with Confidential Computing and their efforts to further this technology via the Confidential Computing Consortium. Learn about confidential computing, the problems it solves, and how you can get involved:
https://openatintel.podbean.com/e/confidential-computing/
Upcoming Events
Confidential Computing Summit
The Confidential Computing Consortium is a co-organizer of the Confidential Computing Summit. The event will take place in San Francisco on the 29th of June. The Confidential Computing Summit brings together experts, innovators, cloud providers, software and hardware providers, and user organizations from all industries to accelerate key initiatives in confidential computing. Call for Speakers are open.
Women in Confidential Computing
In March we celebrated International Women’s month. We have several women who are leading the way and advancing Confidential Computing, among which:
- Raluca Ada Popa: Raluca is an associate professor of computer science at UC Berkeley. She is interested in security, systems, and applied cryptography. Raluca developed practical systems that protect data confidentiality by computing over encrypted data, as well as designed new encryption schemes that underlie these systems. Some of her systems have been adopted into or inspired systems such as SEEED of SAP AG, Microsoft SQL Server’s Always Encrypted Service, and others. Raluca received her PhD in computer science as well as her two BS degrees, in computer science and in mathematics, from MIT. She is the recipient of an Intel Early Career Faculty Honor award, George M. Sprowls Award for best MIT CS doctoral thesis, a Google PhD Fellowship, a Johnson award for best CS Masters of Engineering thesis from MIT, and a CRA Outstanding undergraduate award from the ACM.
- Mona Vij: Mona is a Principal Engineer and Cloud and Data Center Security Research Manager at Intel Labs, where she focuses on Scalable Confidential Computing for end-to-end Cloud to Edge security. Mona received her Master’s degree in Computer Science from University of Delhi, India. Mona leads the research engagements on Trusted execution with a number of universities. Her research has been featured in journals and conferences including USNIX OSDI, USENIX ATC and ACM ASPLOS, among others. Mona’s research interests primarily include trusted computing, virtualization, device drivers and operating systems.
- Nelly Porter: Nelly is a lead of the Confidential Computing in Google with over 10 years’ experience in platform security, virtsec, PKI, crypto, authentication, and authorization field. She is working on multiple areas in Google, from root of trust, Titan, to the Shielded and Confidential Computing, has 25 patents and defensive publications. Prior to working at Google, Porter spent some time working in Microsoft in the virtualization and security space, HP Labs advancing clustering story, and Scientix (Israel) as a firmware and kernel driver eng. She has two sons, both are in the CS field, one of them is working for Google.
- Lily Sturmann: Lily is a senior software engineer at Red Hat in the Office of the CTO in Emerging Technologies. She has primarily worked on security projects related to remote attestation, confidential computing, and securing the software supply chain.
- Ijlal Loutfi: Ijlal is a security product manager at Canonical, the publishers of Ubuntu. She’s a post-doctoral researcher at the Norwegian University of Science of Technology, working with Professor Bian Yang. Her PhD was on trusted computing, trusted execution environments and online user authentication. Research interests include: Online identity management, namely self-sovereign identities; Applied cryptography, namely, proxy re-encryption; and Verifiable Remote Computation.
- Mary Beth Chalk: Mary is the Co-founder & Chief Commercial Officer at BeeKeeperAI, Inc. has over 25 years of healthcare innovation experience improving outcomes through data-informed decision making, services, and processes. Her early work with health systems was grounded in statistical process control enabling healthcare executives to discern the signal from the noise of their data. As COO of a mental health organization, she created and implemented a system of predictive algorithms to improve the effectiveness of psychotherapy treatment. Mary Beth was also the co-founder of a chronic disease self-management platform that combined monitoring device data with algorithm-driven digital behavioral coaching to improve health engagement and outcomes. Her current work is focused on the development of healthcare AI from the perspective of the data owner and the algorithm owner including issues such as data access and intellectual property.
- Ellison Anne Williams: Anne is the Founder and CEO of Enveil, the pioneering data security startup protecting Data in Use. She has more than a decade of experience spearheading avant-garde efforts in the areas of large scale analytics, information security and privacy, computer network exploitation, and network modeling at the National Security Agency and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. In addition to her leadership experience, she is accomplished in the fields of distributed computing and algorithms, cryptographic applications, graph theory, combinatorics, machine learning, and data mining and holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics (Algebraic Combinatorics), a M.S. in Mathematics (Set Theoretic Topology), and a M.S. in Computer Science (Machine Learning).
- Sandrine Murcia: Sandrine is the CEO and co-founder of Cosmian, The Personal Data Network. Powered by peer-to-peer and blockchain technologies, Cosmian is the reference for personal data control & access, while favoring sustainable economic models for publishers and brands. Sandrine began her career in 1995 at Procter & Gamble. In 1999, thrilled by the emerging potential of the Internet, she switched gears and joined Microsoft’s MSN consumer division. In 2004, Sandrine joined Google and exercised responsibilities as Southern Europe Marketing Director. Sandrine holds a BA in Biotechnologies from INSA Lyon and a HEC Paris Master in Entrepreneurship. Sandrine is a 2004 Kellogg School of Management MBA graduate.
CCC and FHE
Dan Middleton, CCC TAC Chair, and Rosario Cammarota, Chief Scientist | Privacy-Enhanced Computing Research, Intel Corp., published a special blog post comparing Confidential Computing and Homomorphic Encryption. The blog post is available here:
Wikipedia
The Wikipedia article for Confidential Computing is now under the “Drafts” section, awaiting for one of the Wikipedia maintainers to review and publish it. The article was led by Mike Ferron-Jones under the guidance of Wikipedia consultant Jake Orlowitz with the help of multiple CCC members. The article is available here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Confidential_computing
Thanks,
The Confidential Computing Consortium
