Welcome to the April 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.
Welcome New Members!
Spectro Cloud has recently joined the CCC. Founded by multi-cloud management experts, Spectro Cloud aims to make cloud infrastructure boundaryless for the enterprise. It provide solutions that help enterprises run Kubernetes their way, anywhere.
A word from Mike Bursell, CCC’s new Executive Director
I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve just started a new role as part-time Executive Director for the Confidential Computing Consortium, which is a project of the The Linux Foundation. I have been involved from the very earliest days of the consortium, which was founded in 2019, and I’m delighted to be joining as an officer of the project as we move into the next phase of our growth. I look forward to working with existing and future members and helping to expand industry adoption of Confidential Computing.
For those of you who’ve been following what I’ve been up to over the years, this may not be a huge surprise, at least in terms of my involvement, which started right at the beginning of the CCC. In fact, Enarx, the open source project of which I was co-founder, was the very first project to be accepted into the CCC, and Red Hat, where I was Chief Security Architect (in the Office of the CTO) at the time, was one of the founding members. Since then, I’ve served on the Governing Board (twice, once as Red Hat’s representative as a Premier member, and once as an elected representative of the General members) acted as Treasurer, been Co-chair of the Attestation SIG and been extremely active in the Technical Advisory Council. I was instrumental in initiating the creation of the first analyst report into Confidential Computing and helped in the creation of the two technical and one general white paper published by the CCC. I’ve enjoyed working with the brilliant industry leaders who more than ably lead the CCC, many of whom I now count not only as valued colleagues but also as friends.
The position – Executive Director – however, is news. For a while, the CCC has been looking to extend its activities beyond what the current officers of the consortium can manage, given that they have full-time jobs outside the CCC. The consortium has grown to over 40 members now – 8 Premier, 35 General and 8 Associate – and with that comes both the opportunity to engage in a whole new set of activities, but also a responsibility to listen to the various voices of the membership and to ensure that the consortium’s activities are aligned with the expectations and ambitions of the members. Beyond that, as Confidential Computing becomes more pervasive, it’s time to ensure that (as far as possible), there’s a consistent, crisp and compelling set of messages going out to potential adopters of the technology, as well as academics and regulators.
I plan to be working on the issues above. I’ve only just started and there’s a lot to be doing – and the role is only part-time! – but I look forward to furthering the aims of the CCC:
“The Confidential Computing Consortium is a community focused on projects securing data in use and accelerating the adoption of confidential computing through open collaboration.” – The core mission of the CCC
Wish me luck, or, even better, get in touch and get involved yourself.
Recent Events
Kubecon Europe, April 18-21, Amsterdam
– Keynote: MLOps on Highly Sensitive Data – Strict Confinement, Confidential Computing, and Tokenization Protecting Privacy – Maciej Mazur, Principal AI/ML Engineer, Canonical & Andreea Munteanu, AI/ML Product Manager, Canonical
– Confidential Containers Made Easy – Fabiano Fidencio, Intel & Jens Freimann, Red Hat
– The Next Episode in Workload Isolation: Confidential Containers – Jeremi Piotrowski, Microsoft
RSA Conference, April 24-27, San Francisco
CCC member Kate George from Intel went to RSA to raise awareness about the CCC and promote CC Summit.
– The Rise of Confidential Computing, What It Is and What it Means to You – Stephanie Domas, Intel
– Cloud Security Made for the EU: Securing Data & Applications – Dr. Norbert Pohlmann, IT Security Association Germany (TeleTrusT) (Moderator), Ulla Coester, Westphalian University of Applied Sciences Gelsenkirchen (Panelist), Nils Karn, Mitigant by Resility (Panelist), Andreas Walbrodt, enclaive (Panelist)
Upcoming Events
Open Source Summit North America, May 10-12, Vancouver
Mike Bursell will attend the event to promote the CCC. Confidential Computing talks include:
– Advancements in Confidential Computing – Vojtěch Pavlik, SUSE
– WASM + CC, Secure Your FaaS Function – Xinran Wang & Liang He, Intel
– A WASM Runtime for FaaS Protected by TEE – Sara Wang & Yongli He, Intel
– OpenFL: A Federated Learning Project to Power Your Projects – Ezequiel Lanza, Intel
Confidential Computing Summit, June 29th, San Francisco
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 CCC and Opaque are launching the Confidential Computing Use Case Awards, asking teams to share their most interesting use cases across healthcare, financial services, adtech, and social good, with the chance to be recognized at the summit:
Webinar
Arm Confidential Compute Architecture, May 23rd
The Arm Confidential Compute Architecture (Arm CCA) builds on top of the Armv9-A Realm Management Extension (RME) by providing a reference security architecture and open-source implementation of hypervisor-based confidential computing. This talk describes the latest open-source project developments (Trusted Firmware, Linux, KVM, EDK2) to enable Arm CCA, including current status and next steps.
CCC Blog: Why Attestation is Required for Confidential Computing?
Alec Fernandez from Microsoft clarifies why the CCC amended the definition of Confidential Computing to add attestation:
Wikipedia
The Wikipedia article for Confidential Computing has now been officially published. 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/Confidential_computing
Thanks,
The Confidential Computing Consortium
