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2025

Aug 28

Welcome to the August 2025 Newsletter

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In Today’s Issue

  1. From the Executive Director
  2. Outreach
  3. Upcoming Events
  4. From the TAC
  5. Recent News

Hello Community Member,

This month’s update highlights important progress across the Consortium, including insights from the TAC, Outreach, and Executive Director, as well as recent member news. From preparing strategic priorities for 2026 to hands-on technical advances and upcoming events like the AI Infrastructure Summit and our October workshop, the CCC continues to bring members together to shape the future of Confidential Computing. Read on for the latest updates!

From the Executive Director 

While the Consortium isn’t very busy with activities like conferences over August, that doesn’t mean that important work stands still.  I’ve been working with members of the leadership team to prepare us for 2026.  Budgets need to be approved towards the end of the year, of course, but we can’t start on that without a good understanding of what our strategic priorities should be for the next 12 months.  So we’ve been looking at what our options might be and are looking forward to the Governing Board meeting at the end of this month, where we hope to have a robust debate about what we might do.

One of the interesting things about the Consortium is the high number of start-ups who are (mostly) General Members, and balancing their interests with those of our larger members, some of whom are Premier Members. We work hard to ensure that the views, goals and concerns of smaller members are considered and represented at the strategic level, and the make-up of the Governing Board includes three representatives of the General Members, elected once a year to the Board.  We value their input and they each have a vote, equal with those of the Premier Members.

Outreach

Outreach took the month off to lay by the pool and drink mojitas (we wish!).  Actually, it’s been a sprint to prepare for upcoming events including the AI Infrastructure Summit in Santa Clara, California and plan our customer workshop in San Francisco.  CCC presence at AI Infrastructure Summit (September 9-11) is packed with member participation on panels, pre-show workshops, at-show sessions, podcasts, and a booth.  Thanks to members Anjuna, Hushmesh, Invary, and Mainsail for their leadership at the event.  Outreach is also planning a customer workshop for ~30 attendees on October 20 in San Francisco with a strong line-up of speakers on topics ranging from confidential AI, regulatory compliance, and even a build-your-own-use case exercise.  Tip of the hat to members Nvidia and TikTok for taking point on workshop planning.  And finally, the international survey results from our market research project with IDC are in, and we are looking forward to seeing the initial report at the Outreach meeting on September 3.  IDC is targeting delivery of their full report in early October, which will be available to all members.  Maybe we’ll get to lay by the pool in November?  We can hope.

Upcoming Events

Blog-Aug-27-2025-02-14-55-4391-PM

From the TAC

Despite August vacations a lot transpired this month in the Technical Advisory Council. ManaTEE delivered its first annual report from Mingshen Sun. Since joining a year ago the project has made its first community release, refactored a lot of the initial research code, and added a new TEE backend (Intel TDX). They also added documentation which is great for first time users and contributors and have a slick webpage.

We also got an update on the RISC-V confidential computing architecture, CoVE from Ravi Sahita. Ravi walked us through the CoVE Application Binary Interface and Reference Architecture. Much of the collaboration for this work takes place in a sister organization in the Linux Foundation. Learn more.

We also heard from Red Hat’s Dr. Chris Butler. Chris talked about his experiences in the field applying Confidential Computing to real customer problems. It was a great ground truth on customer perceptions of the technology. One of my main takeaways was the importance of compliance in customer decisions. This has been a big topic across the Consortium and one that we need even more focus on. You can watch all of this in our TAC playlist on youtube – check out the August 7th meeting.

Recent News

  • We’re excited to welcome QLAD to the CCC as a new Start-up Member! QLAD is a Kubernetes-native confidential computing platform delivering pod-level TEEs, encrypted Armored Containers™, and post-quantum resilience—making confidentiality scalable and production-ready. With contributions already in the Confidential Containers project and a vision to simplify secure computing, QLAD is helping define the next era of Confidential Computing. Read the announcement.

Best regards,

The Confidential Computing Consortium

Aug 21

QLAD Joins the Confidential Computing Consortium

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We’re pleased to welcome QLAD to the Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC), as the latest innovator helping define the next era of secure computing.

QLAD is a Kubernetes-native confidential computing platform that provides runtime protection by default, delivering pod-level Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and featuring encrypted Armored Containers™ for enhanced IP protection and post-quantum resilience. With post-quantum resilience and seamless integration, no code rewrites or infrastructure changes required, QLAD enables scalable, production-ready confidentiality for modern workloads.

“At QLAD, we believe confidential computing should be simple. We’re building a platform that delivers drop-in protection for sensitive workloads, without code rewrites or infrastructure disruption. We’re proud to join the CCC community and contribute to the standards, tooling, and trust models that help organizations stay secure across clouds, edges, and collaborative environments.”
— Jason Tuschen, CEO, QLAD

Confidential computing is undergoing a transformation, from experimental to essential. QLAD was founded to help accelerate that shift by making trusted execution practical and DevOps-friendly, especially for organizations deploying at scale across cloud, hybrid, and edge environments.

Why QLAD joined CCC

The CCC provides a powerful venue to drive industry alignment on standards, reference architectures, and transparent governance. QLAD sees the consortium as a collaborative platform to:

  • Champion workload-first adoption patterns (beyond VM- or node-level models)
  • Demystify confidential computing for developers and security teams
  • Share insights as it prepares to open-source components of its container security layer in late 2025

What QLAD brings to the community
QLAD engineers are already contributing to CCC-hosted initiatives, including the Confidential Containers (CoCo) project. Contributions to date include:

  • QLAD engineers have contributed directly to the Confidential Containers (CoCo) project, including adding AWS SNP VLEK support across three repositories (trustee, guest-components, and azure-cvm-tooling)
  • Submitted eight pull requests (all merged) to cloud-api-adaptor, advancing workload orchestration in confidential environments
  • Engaged with members of U.S. Congress to raise awareness of Confidential Computing and Confidential Containers, helping ensure the technology receives attention and potential funding at the federal level

As QLAD prepares to open source additional components, it plans to work closely with the CCC Technical Advisory Council to align on contribution pathways and ensure long-term technical alignment.

What QLAD hopes to gain
 In joining CCC, QLAD looks forward to:

  • Advancing attestation frameworks, policy enforcement models, and container standards
  • Collaborating with industry peers solving real-world deployment challenges
  • Participating in working groups that shape the future of confidential computing across AI, hybrid cloud, and zero-trust environments

We’re excited to welcome QLAD into the CCC community and look forward to their continued contributions to making confidential computing scalable, practical, and trusted by default.

Aug 05

Welcome to the July 2025 Newsletter

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JulyNewsletter

In Today’s Issue

  1. From the Executive Director
  2. Outreach
  3. Upcoming Events
  4. From the TAC
  5. Recent News

Hello Community Member,

This month’s update features progress across our technical community, including updates from the TAC and Outreach Committees, new project proposals, upcoming event plans for the fall, and exciting member news. From standards engagement to real-world demo planning, the CCC continues to build momentum across the ecosystem. Read on for the latest news!

From the Executive Director (ED)

As the summer hits in the Northern Hemisphere, things sometimes slow down, but although there are no major conferences for a month or so at which the CCC is appearing, committee and SIG meetings are continuing apace.  Of particular note is the Outreach Committee’s has task force to evaluate the effectiveness and value for money of the various activities in which we engage.  A number of TAC SIG members have been working with standards bodies to ensure that Confidential Computing is appropriately represented in their outputs and also to work on various protocols that include Confidential Computing primitives. We always welcome involvement in our various committees and SIGs – and you don’t need to be a member to contribute, so please come along.  

It’s also worth noting that almost all of our meetings are recorded and made available on the Confidential Computing Consortium’s YouTube channel, allowing you to catch up on any topics you’ve missed.  There are Slack channels and mailing lists for asynchronous communication as well: visit the Committees page on the website for more information.

Finally, we have a number of new members expected to join us in the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for news around that!

Outreach

The Outreach Committee carried the Confidential Computing message to the market across a range of channels.  Website, blog, and social metrics were all up over the quarter.  We also came away from CC Summit and OSS North America with a good archive of talks from many members available for promotion.  We are gearing up for two major in-person events in Q4’25: AI Infrastructure Summit (Silicon Valley) in September, and a bespoke customer workshop in San Francisco in October.  For the AI Infrastructure Summit, we have a full slate of activities including on-line workshops, panel discussions, sessions, podcast appearances, and the CCC booth.  The October event will be a one-day workshop featuring speakers, demos, and customer success stories.  Thanks to all the members contributing their efforts to these events.

Outreach is also in the midst of a strategy reassessment.  We are looking at our objectives and tactics and plan to report out to the Governing Board soon with recommendations we believe will drive more awareness, engagement, and adoption of Confidential Computing.

Upcoming Events

From the TAC

The Open Enclave SDK project recently completed its 2025 annual review, highlighting its continued role as one of the most mature and widely adopted projects within the Confidential Computing Consortium. Designed to support hardware-backed Trusted Execution Environments, OE remains central to production deployments—particularly in Intel SGX-based systems—offering a stable, well-maintained foundation for building secure enclave applications. The project’s ongoing contributions, robust documentation, and ecosystem integration make it a critical pillar of the CCC’s technical landscape. Its long-standing reliability continues to benefit both new developers and organizations building trusted workloads at scale.

In addition, the TAC is currently reviewing a proposal for a new project: dstack, an open-source confidential AI orchestration framework. Designed for secure deployment of AI workloads in TEEs, dstack represents a promising direction for expanding the Consortium’s footprint into privacy-preserving machine learning. The proposal is available on the TAC mailing list for community review, and a resolution is expected next month. We encourage members to explore the project and share feedback as part of our open, collaborative governance process.

Screenshot 2025-07-31 at 4.06.37 PM

Recent News

  • Missed the Confidential Computing Consortium Mini Summit at OSSNA 2025? The full session recordings are now live on the CCC YouTube channel! From ecosystem updates to deep dives into real-world applications, catch talks from leaders at NVIDIA, Microsoft, and more. Catch up now.
  • Confidential Computing underpins the “Mesh”, a secure-by-design alternative to the web. CCC member Hushmesh—a 2024 NATO DIANA startup (DIANA being NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic)—has been selected for NATO’s Rapid Adoption Action Plan, ratified at the 2025 NATO Summit in The Hague. In collaboration with NATO DIANA, the NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA), and NATO HQ, Hushmesh will begin pilots of its Confidential Computing-based technologies: Universal Zero Trust, Entity-Centric Information Security, and “Meshaging.” This selection highlights the strategic relevance of Hushmesh’s “Mesh” infrastructure for defense and alliance-wide trustworthy collaboration.
    At the core of Hushmesh’s approach is Confidential Computing, which ensures that information remains protected not only at rest and in transit, but also in use—secured within hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). This secure-by-design foundation underpins the Mesh: a next-generation global information infrastructure that automates end-to-end information provenance, integrity, authenticity, confidentiality, privacy, and zero trust at the computing process and chip levels. It represents a fundamental shift from legacy IT-centric, and domain-centric web paradigms—addressing foundational vulnerabilities with today’s computing approaches. Built on Confidential Computing, the Mesh offers a path to universal cybersecurity and cross-domain trust to meet the secure collaboration needs of NATO and other large-scale organizations operating across national and corporate boundaries.
  • Are open source attestation tools speaking the same language? In Harsh Vardhan Mahawar’s LFX mentorship with the CCC, he tackled this challenge – mapping Keylime, Veraison & JANE to the IETF’s RATS model, implementing the CMW wrapper, and introducing python-ear for EAT attestation results. Read the blog.
  • What is Confidential Computing—and why does it matter? Watch the interview with Mike Bursell, Executive Director of the Confidential Computing Consortium, as he breaks down the fundamentals of confidential computing, attestation, and their growing importance in today’s security landscape.
CCCInterview

We’re excited to welcome Tinfoil as the newest start-up member of the Confidential Computing Consortium. Tinfoil is an open source platform delivering cryptographically verifiable privacy for AI workloads—ensuring user data remains protected, even from the cloud provider. Learn more about their work and how they plan to contribute to the CCC community.

Best regards,

The Confidential Computing Consortium

Let’s grow our community!  Share this with your network.

Jul 29

Harmonizing Open-Source Remote Attestation: My LFX Mentorship Journey

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By Harsh Vardhan Mahawar

This blog post encapsulates my experience and contributions during the Linux Foundation Mentorship Program under the Confidential Computing Consortium. The core objective of this mentorship was to advance the standardization of remote attestation procedures, a critical facet of establishing trust in dynamic and distributed computing environments. Through focusing on the IETF’s Remote Attestation Procedures (RATS) architecture, we aimed to enhance interoperability and streamline the integration of various open-source verifier projects like Keylime, JANE, and Veraison.

Motivation: Why Standardization Matters

Open-source remote attestation tools often develop independently, resulting in inconsistencies in how they format and exchange attestation data. This fragmentation poses a challenge for interoperability across verifiers, relying parties, and attesters.

My mentorship focused on aligning these implementations with two crucial IETF drafts:

The goal was to standardize both evidence encoding and attestation result reporting, facilitating smoother integration between systems.

Laying the Foundation: Mapping to the RATS Architecture

Before diving into implementation, a fundamental understanding of the RATS architecture and its alignment with existing solutions was paramount. The RATS Working Group defines a standardized framework for remote attestation, enabling a Relying Party to determine the trustworthiness of an Attester based on evidence produced by such an Attester.

Our initial phase involved a detailed mapping of prominent open-source remote attestation tools—Keylime, JANE, and Veraison—against the RATS architectural model. This exercise was not merely theoretical; it was an actionable analysis driven by key principles:

  • Granularity: Pinpointing specific components and their RATS functions, rather than broad role assignments.
  • Data Flow: Analyzing the journey of evidence, endorsements, and attestation results to align with RATS conveyance models.
  • Standardization Focus: Identifying areas where these projects could adopt RATS-recommended standards.
  • Actionable Insights: Providing clear directions for modifications to enhance RATS compliance.

This foundational work was crucial because it provided a clear roadmap, highlighting where standardization gaps existed and how our contributions could most effectively bridge them, fostering a more unified confidential computing ecosystem.

1. Keylime

Keylime is a comprehensive remote attestation solution for Linux systems, focusing on TPM-based attestation. It ensures cloud infrastructure trustworthiness by continuously collecting and verifying evidence.

2. JANE

Jane Attestation Engine (a fork and major rewrite of the former A10 Nokia Attestation Engine i.e. NAE) is an experimental remote attestation framework designed to be technology-agnostic.

3. Veraison

Veraison is an attestation verification project under the Confidential Computing Consortium. It focuses on providing a flexible and extensible Verifier component for remote attestation, supporting multiple attestation token formats and providing APIs for evidence verification and endorsement provisioning.

Standardizing Evidence: The Conceptual Messages Wrapper (CMW)

A significant challenge in remote attestation is the diversity of evidence formats produced by different attestation technologies. This heterogeneity necessitates complex parsing and integration logic on the Relying Party’s side. The Conceptual Message Wrapper (CMW), as defined by IETF, offers a solution by providing a standardized collection data structure for attestation evidence.

My work involved implementing CMW within Keylime. The goal was to transition Keylime’s custom KeylimeQuote evidence format to the standardized CMW format, specifically targeting a new API version vX.X (version to be finalized). This involved:

  • Encapsulation: Wrapping disparate evidence components—such as TPM TPMS_ATTEST structures, TPMT_SIGNATURE values, PCRs, IMA measurement lists, measured boot logs, and Keylime-specific metadata (e.g., public key, boot time)—into a unified CMW structure.
  • Serialization: Ensuring proper base64url encoding and adhering to a defined JSON schema for the wrapped evidence.
  • Canonical Event Log (CEL) Integration: A crucial part was integrating the Canonical Event Log (CEL) format (from the Trusted Computing Group) for IMA and measured boot logs, further enhancing interoperability. This required careful parsing of raw log data and constructing CEL-compliant entries.
  • API Versioning: Implementing logic within the Keylime agent to serve CMW-formatted evidence for vX.X (version to be finalized) requests, while retaining support for legacy formats.

The motivation behind adopting CMW is clear: it significantly streamlines the implementation process for developers, allowing Relying Parties to remain agnostic to specific attestation technologies. This approach fosters extensibility, enabling easier support for new conceptual messages and attestation technologies without altering the core processing logic.

Standardizing Appraisal Results: EAT Attestation Results (EAR)

Beyond standardizing evidence, it is equally important to standardize the results of attestation. This is where the EAT Attestation Results (EAR) comes into play. EAR provides a flexible and extensible data model for conveying attestation results, allowing a verifier to summarize the trustworthiness of an Attester concisely and verifiably.

My contribution to EAT standardization focused on two main fronts:

  1. Developing a Python Library (python-ear): I developed a Python library (python-ear) that implements the EAT Attestation Results (EAR) data format, as specified in draft-fv-rats-ear. This library provides essential functionalities:
  • Claim Population: Defining and populating various EAR claims (e.g., instance_identity, hardware, executables, configuration) that represent appraisal outcomes.
  • Serialization/Deserialization: Encoding EAR claims as JSON Web Tokens (JWT) or Concise Binary Object Representation Web Tokens (CWT) and decoding them.
  • Signing and Verification: Supporting cryptographic signing of EAR claims with private keys and verification with public keys to ensure data integrity and authenticity.
  • Validation: Implementing validation logic to ensure EAR objects adhere to the specified schema.
  1. Keylime EAT Plugin: This work extends Keylime’s durable attestation framework by integrating EAT-based appraisal logic. The goal is to transform raw attestation evidence and policy data into structured AR4SI TrustVector claims, thereby enhancing the auditability and semantic richness of attestation outcomes. This critical step involved:
  • Evidence Validation: Leveraging Keylime’s existing functions to perform comprehensive validation of TPM quotes, IMA measurements, and measured boot logs.
  • Failure Mapping: Precisely mapping the various Failure events generated during Keylime’s internal validation processes to specific TrustClaim values within the EAT TrustVector. For instance, a quote validation failure indicating an invalid public key would map to an UNRECOGNIZED_INSTANCE claim.
  • State Management: A significant challenge was ensuring that the EAT appraisal logic could utilize Keylime’s validation functions without inadvertently altering the agent’s internal state, which could interfere with Keylime’s continuous attestation workflow. This necessitated careful refactoring and the introduction of flags to prevent state changes.
  • Submodule Status: Defining how the overall status of the EAT submodule (e.g., “affirming,” “warning,” “contraindicated”) is derived from the aggregated TrustClaim values.

The implementation of EAT is vital for realizing the full potential of remote attestation. It provides a common language for trustworthiness, allowing Relying Parties to make automated, policy-driven decisions based on a consistent, verifiable attestation result, irrespective of the underlying hardware or software components being attested.

Conclusion and Future Outlook

This LFX Mentorship has been an invaluable journey, providing a unique opportunity to contribute to the evolving landscape of confidential computing. By focusing on RATS architecture mapping, implementing the Conceptual Message Wrapper for evidence, and integrating Entity Attestation Tokens for appraisal results, we have made tangible steps towards enhancing interoperability, standardization, and the overall security posture of open-source remote attestation solutions.

The work on CMW and EAT is critical for fostering a more robust and scalable trusted and confidential computing ecosystem. It enables easier integration of diverse attestation technologies and provides a unified, machine-readable format for conveying trustworthiness. My gratitude goes to my mentors, Thore Sommer and Thomas Fossati, for their guidance, insights, and continuous support throughout this program.

While significant progress has been made, the journey towards a fully harmonized remote attestation ecosystem continues. Future efforts will involve full upstreaming of these changes into the respective projects and exploring broader adoption across the confidential computing landscape, further solidifying the foundations of trust in a dynamic digital world.

References

  1. IETF’s Remote Attestation Procedures (RATS) architecture
  2. Keylime
  3. JANE
  4. Veraison
  5. CMW (Conceptual Messages Wrapper)
  6. EAT (Entity Attestation Token)
  7. EAR (EAT Attestation Results)
  8. Canonical Event Log (CEL)
  9. python-ear library
Jul 21

Welcoming Tinfoil to the Confidential Computing Consortium

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We’re thrilled to welcome Tinfoil as the newest start-up member of the Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC)!

Tinfoil is an open source platform delivering cryptographically verifiable privacy for AI workloads. Their mission is to make it safe to process sensitive data through powerful AI models—without compromising user privacy. By leveraging confidential computing technologies, including NVIDIA’s confidential computing-enabled GPUs, Tinfoil ensures that no one—not even Tinfoil or the cloud provider—can access private user data. The platform also safeguards AI model weights from unauthorized access and supports end-to-end supply chain security guarantees.

“We’re excited to collaborate with the community to make hardware-backed AI privacy the standard.” — Tanya Verma, CEO of Tinfoil

As a company deeply invested in confidential computing, Tinfoil is joining CCC to both learn from and contribute to the broader ecosystem. Their team is especially interested in collaborating with others working at the intersection of secure hardware and AI, and in helping shape future standards for confidential AI. Currently, they’re using Ubuntu Confidential VMs from Canonical and NVIDIA’s verification tools, with plans to contribute to these open source projects over time.

We’re excited to have Tinfoil join the CCC community and look forward to the insights and innovation they’ll bring as we work together to advance the future of trusted, verifiable computing.

Jul 15

Now Available – Recordings from CCC’s Mini Summit at OSS NA 2025

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The recordings from the Confidential Computing Consortium Mini Summit at Open Source Summit North America 2025 are now available.

All sessions have been uploaded to the CCC YouTube channel, featuring a range of insightful talks from across the confidential computing ecosystem.

If you missed the summit or want to revisit any of the sessions, be sure to catch up here:
Watch now:

Introduction – Mike Bursell

Confidential Computing for Scaling Inference Workloads – Julian Stephen

Scaling Trust for Autonomous Intelligence with NVIDIA – Karthik Mandakolathur

Trustless Attestation Verification in Distributed Confidential Computing – Donghang Lu

Wrap Up – Mike Bursell

The talks cover community updates, technical discussions, and real-world use cases—offering valuable insights into the future of confidential computing.

Thank you to all our speakers, contributors, and attendees. Stay tuned for more updates of CCC and get involved today.

Jul 08

Welcome Mainsail Industries as a New Confidential Computing Consortium Start-up Member!

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WelcomeMainsail

We’re thrilled to welcome Mainsail Industries as the newest start-up member of the Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC)! As pioneers in secure edge virtualization, Mainsail is joining a global community of leaders who are shaping the future of confidential computing—together.

About Mainsail Industries

Mainsail Industries is on a mission to deliver the world’s most secure edge virtualization platform and common computing environment—safeguarding critical infrastructure and the defense industrial base, while enabling organizations to modernize and achieve mission success.

At the heart of their innovation is Metalvisor, a secure, cloud-native virtualization platform purpose-built for the modern edge. Designed with simplicity, scalability, and security in mind, Metalvisor helps organizations extend the life of their most critical assets and meet the evolving demands of today’s mission-critical workloads.

What is Metalvisor?

Metalvisor is redefining what secure virtualization can look like. Unlike traditional hypervisors, Metalvisor is designed for modern workloads—Virtual Machines (VMs), MicroVMs, and Containers—while eliminating the operational complexity that often comes with secure infrastructure. It leverages cutting-edge technologies to streamline cluster management, support cloud-native patterns, and ensure security through Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and Trusted Workload Identity (TWI).

Metalvisor in Action:

  • Secure Edge Computing: Metalvisor brings cloud-native capabilities to the edge, optimizing size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) for environments where security and performance are paramount.
  • Secure Containers: Simplifies virtualization for container-based workloads, blending the agility of containers with the protection of next-generation hypervisors.
  • Secure AI: Protects sensitive AI/ML workloads through TEEs and TWI, ensuring both data and model integrity via hardware-rooted trust.

Why Mainsail Joined the CCC

“Joining the Confidential Computing Consortium is an exciting milestone for Mainsail. As CTO, I’m inspired by the level of thought leadership and collaboration happening within the CCC. It’s rare to find a space where so many different organizations come together to shape the future of secure computing, and I believe this collective effort will have a lasting, global impact.”
— Brad Sollar, CTO & Co-Founder

Mainsail sees the CCC as both a community of peers and a catalyst for impact. With deep experience in trusted workloads, confidential virtualization, and workload identity, the team is eager to share insights from building Metalvisor—and to learn from other contributors tackling similar challenges.

Mainsail is especially excited to contribute to the development of standards and best practices around Trusted Workload Identity—a key capability in delivering secure, scalable computing environments.

Contributing to the Ecosystem

Mainsail is actively contributing to the Trusted Workload Identity (TWI) Special Interest Group, collaborating with 21 other contributors to advance the trustworthiness and interoperability of workload identity solutions across platforms.

“Collaborating with 21 other contributors in the Trusted Workload Identity (TWI) SIG reaffirmed Metalvisor’s leadership in confidential computing. We’re proud to be shaping the future of this next-generation technology, bridging the gap between trusted execution environments and trusted workloads—a capability Metalvisor has delivered since day one.”
— Eric Wolfe, Chief Engineer

Please join us in giving a warm welcome to the team at Mainsail Industries! We look forward to the expertise and innovation they’ll bring to the Confidential Computing Consortium.

Jul 03

Welcome to the 2025 June Newsletter

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In today’s issue, learn about:

  1. From the Executive Director
  2. Outreach
  3. Upcoming Events
  4. From the TAC
  5. Recent News

Welcome to our latest newsletter! The June 2025 CCC newsletter spotlights recent events the CCC community has participated in, as well as technical updates on Coconut SVSM and Glossary. Read all the details below!

From the Executive Director (ED)

The second half of June has been a very busy time for Confidential Computing, with three events nearly back-to-back. The first was the Confidential Computing Summit in San Francisco, organized by CCC member Opaque, sponsored by the CCC and attended by many members. I gave a keynote on Aligning Confidential Computing with Use Cases, and there were keynotes and sessions from many very illustrious members of our community. Nelly Porter (Chair of the Governing Board), Dan Middleton (Chair of the Technical Advisory Committee) and I also ran a panel on the CCC, what we’re for and the benefits of engagement. Videos of sessions at the event should be available shortly, and are certainly worth watching to catch up.

The week after, in Denver, the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit North America also contained a number of sessions around Confidential Computing, and was followed the day after by a mini-Summit on Confidential Computing, run by the CCC.

These events can only take place with the involvement of our members, and I’d like to thank the individuals and organizations who devote time and resources to making them work. We have more events coming up: for more information, join one of the Outreach Committee’s meetings (or watch them on YouTube!).

Outreach

Confidential Computing Summit Retro

The 2025 Confidential Computing Summit featured an impressive lineup of 93 sessions across two days, bringing together senior leaders from Microsoft, NVIDIA, Meta, Intel, IBM, Google, and renowned academics from Stanford and Berkeley. The agenda included a mix of technical deep dives, thought leadership panels, and hands-on workshops led by teams from LangChain, CrewAI, and Galileo, offering valuable opportunities to explore topics such as agentic AI and secure deployment frameworks.

The Confidential Computing Consortium booth served as a central hub for member companies to showcase their latest projects and engage with attendees on the evolving mission of confidential computing.

A key highlight was the Confidential Computing Consortium session, where leaders such as Mike Bursell, Dan Middleton, and Nelly Porter from the Linux Foundation, Outreach Committee, Technical Advisory Council, and Governing Board came together for a panel discussion. The session offered attendees a unique look into the consortium’s collaborative efforts, major milestones, and cross-industry priorities. It provided a clear roadmap for how the consortium is driving innovation through community engagement, ecosystem alignment, and open development, and how individuals and organizations can get involved.

Confidential Computing Mini Summit Retro

The Confidential Computing Mini Summit at OSS NA 2025 took place on Thursday, June 26, from 1:30 to 5:00 PM in Colorado. The half-day summit brought together experts and practitioners to explore the latest advancements in confidential computing across infrastructure, AI, and distributed systems.

The summit featured a series of in-depth technical talks. Laura Martinez opened the program with “Scaling Trust for Autonomous Intelligence with NVIDIA”, highlighting how NVIDIA is enabling secure, scalable AI through confidential computing. Donghang Lu followed with “Trustless Attestation Verification in Distributed Confidential Computing”, where he introduced innovative methods for establishing trust in decentralized environments without relying on traditional trust anchors. Finally, Julian Stephen presented “Confidential Computing for Scaling Inference Workloads”, outlining techniques to secure and optimize AI inference using confidential computing technologies. The event concluded with a wrap up session led by Mike Bursell, who summarized key takeaways and encouraged continued collaboration across the ecosystem.

Session recordings will be available soon. Please stay tuned on our Confidential Computing Consortium channel at YouTube.

Upcoming Events

From the TAC

This month we had a great update from Coconut SVSM. The project has matured tremendously and has added a governance structure that will help ensure an architecture in balance with the different TEE providers in the community. 

We also revisited the Glossary project that was initiated last year. After some initial work the Glossary was left untended. For now we’ve decided that we should invest more in it rather than shut it down. The project is useful to other organizations outside of the CCC to have plain language, informal explanations of our terminology. This is a great place to contribute if you are looking to get involved.

Recent News

  • Reporting on the Endorsement API Workshop at Linaro Connect 2025: Last month saw the annual gathering of engineers and experts from across the Arm ecosystem for the Linaro Connect 2025 conference, which this year took place in Lisbon. As promised, confidential computing was an important theme at this year’s conference. Read more in our recap blog.

Best regards,

The Confidential Computing Consortium

Let’s grow our community!  Share this with your network.

Jun 26

Reporting on the Endorsement API Workshop at Linaro Connect 2025

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Last month saw the annual gathering of engineers and experts from across the Arm ecosystem for the Linaro Connect 2025 conference, which this year took place in Lisbon. Read our earlier blog post for a preview and some background about this event.

As promised, confidential computing was an important theme at this year’s conference. Highlights included this keynote from Mike Bursell, and a presentation from Fujitsu on how Confidential AI workloads will be powered by their FUJITSU-MONAKA processor, based on Arm’s Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA).

In this blog post, we’ll reflect on proceedings from the Endorsement API Workshop, which was a full-day event that was co-located with the conference. The workshop assembled a diverse group of expert representatives, from across industry and academia, for an intensive day of focused collaboration. The goal was to address a growing challenge in confidential computing: the distribution of the endorsements and reference values that are so essential to the attestation process, without which we cannot establish trust in our confidential computing environments. It is a data management problem that spans the entire industry, from supply chains all the way to application deployment. How do we tame complexity and fragmentation? How do we scale?

The workshop combined a morning of live, hands-on prototyping, alongside an afternoon of presentations, proposals and discussions.

Key Take-Aways

It was a packed and energetic day, with all participants demonstrating their shared belief that there is a lot of work to do and genuine value to be gained for the industry. Here’s a selection of some of the stand-out topics and activities from the day:

  • A brainstorming conversation to elaborate more precise requirements
  • An exploration of some of the existing, vendor-specific solutions, and how those might inspire new common solutions
  • A survey of the standardisation landscape and the organisations involved
  • An innovative proposal to use Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) files as a resource for the discovery of endorsement artifacts and services
  • A presentation and discussion of the new CoSERV query language, which is designed to facilitate the transfer of endorsement data between producers and consumers in a uniform and scalable way
  • An update on the proof-of-concept implementation of CoSERV that is currently ongoing in the CCC’s Veraison project.

Read the Full Workshop Report

The workshop has its own repository on GitHub, where you can review the full agenda, along with the list of participants. The full recordings for the afternoon session are also available in the repository, as is the detailed written report. You can also access the report directly here.

Get Involved

The workshop was a chapter in an ongoing story, which you can help to shape. Here are some ways that you can stay informed as this work progresses, or become an active collaborator:

  • Follow the IETF RATS Working Group through its meetings and mailing list
  • Follow the CCC Attestation SIG and join its regular public meetings or its Slack community
  • Follow the Veraison project through its regular meetings or its Zulip chat community

Let’s keep working together, openly, to make the attestation-based secure ecosystem a success.

Jun 03

Welcome to the 2025 May Newsletter

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In Today’s Issue

  1. From the Executive Director
  2. Outreach: RSAC Retro
  3. Upcoming Events
  4. From the TAC
  5. Recent News

Welcome to our latest newsletter! The May 2025 CCC newsletter spotlights growing momentum in Confidential Computing through key updates from RSA Conference, outreach activities, and technical advancements such as the SPDM Tools project. It also highlights upcoming events, recent cloud announcements from Intel and Azure, and calls on members to share their stories for broader amplification.

From the Executive Director (ED)

Conference season is fully underway, with the CCC getting involved in various ways in RSA Conference NA (see last month’s newsletter), Linaro Connect in Lisbon earlier in May, and the Confidential Computing Summit and Open Source Summit in June.  Our mission is always to spread the news about Confidential Computing, its use cases and how open source is a great fit – but there’s another aim, as well, which is to encourage our members to tell their stories and show their value to the ecosystem.  

If you’re a member of the CCC and are speaking at a conference, promoting a blog post, posting a set of videos or just making a noise about Confidential Computing, we want to hear about it!  The CCC’s social media reach is already wide and currently expanding (attend our Outreach calls to learn more) and the Consortium isn’t about and for itself – it’s about our members.  So tell us what you’re up to, and we’ll work with you to amplify what you’re up to and show that Confidential Computing isn’t just a niche solution, but a well-proven technology already implemented by industry players large and small across the globe.

Outreach

RSAC – Retro

This year’s RSAC Conference drew nearly 44,000 attendees, 730 speakers, 650 exhibitors and 400 members of the media. Overall, RSAC booth theme centered on AI, reflecting the industry’s increasing focus on artificial intelligence-driven security solutions and innovations.

There was increased awareness about confidential Computing compared to previous years. The Confidential Computing Consortium booth received many questions about how to get started with confidential computing, showing growing interest in this technology. 

The Confidential Computing Consortium hosted an expanded presence at this year’s RSA Conference, featuring a booth twice the size of previous years. The enhanced setup provided a great platform to spotlight a wider array of member-led projects and innovations in Confidential Computing. A record number of CCC members participated by showcasing their technologies, sharing use cases, and engaging with the broader security community, including Anjuna, Fortanix, Hushmesh, IBM, Intel, Invary, Linux Foundation, NVIDIA, and TikTok (in alphabetical order). The strong turnout and collaboration indicated the growing momentum behind Confidential Computing technologies. 

The CCC saw encouraging engagement at RSAC this year, with 193 audience members expressing interest in the Consortium and its mission. This interest translated into digital engagement as well, with 55 unique visitors accessing the CCC landing page during the conference. These metrics reflect growing awareness and curiosity around Confidential Computing and the innovative work being led by CCC members across industries.

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Upcoming Events

From the TAC

This month we highlight the SPDM Tools project. When we want to accelerate AI workloads it’s beneficial to bring a GPU into the security boundary. For that to work securely we have to build a secure channel between the CPU and the GPU. That is the job of Security Protocol and Data Model (SPDM), a DMTF standard. Our CCC project has enabled Intel, Nvidia, Rivos and other companies to work on a joint implementation of this standard. 

In fact, not just this standard but more. One of the “ah ha” moments during Jiewen Yao’s project update this month was from CCC community members who weren’t aware that SPDM Tools also includes implementations of two related protocols, TDISP and IDE. In the near future, the industry will move towards “TEE-IO” which uses SPDM, TDISP, and IDE standards together to shuttle data between the CPU and GPU at speeds near direct memory access (DMA) rates. We had a brief discussion about renaming the project “TEE-IO Tools” to reflect that expanse better. The maintainers, however, pointed out that SPDM can be used on its own to great value in attesting devices independent of TEE-IO. While TEE-IO might be the long term focus for many of us in Confidential Computing, SPDM Tools will still enable use cases in the nearer term and long term that don’t involve the other protocols. 

Finally, if you want to understand what these protocols do and how they work (and you don’t want to read the open source code 🙂 ) you can watch the 2023-06-20 presentation at the Attestation SIG from governing board representative and SPDM Tools maintainer, Samuel Ortiz.

Recent News

  • Intel® TDX is available on IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC.
  • Preview for the next generation of Azure Intel® TDX Confidential VMs:
    • We are excited to announce the preview of Azure’s next generation of Confidential Virtual Machines powered by the 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors (code-named Emerald Rapids) with Intel® Trust Domain Extensions (Intel® TDX).  This will help to enable organizations to bring confidential workloads to the cloud without code changes to applications. The supported SKUs include the general-purpose families DCesv6-series and the memory optimized families ECesv6-series.
    • Confidential VMs are designed for tenants with high security and confidentiality requirements, providing a strong, attestable, hardware-enforced boundary. They ensure that your data and applications stay private and encrypted even while in use, keeping your sensitive code and other data encrypted in memory during processing.
    • Please sign up at here.
  • Applied Blockchain Turns 10: An Evening of Insight & Innovation – Live Event
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