In Today’s Issue
- From the Executive Director
- Outreach: RSAC Retro
- Upcoming Events
- From the TAC
- 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.
Upcoming Events
- Confidential Computing Summit June 17-18, 2025
- Confidential Computing Mini Summit June 26, 2025
- AI Infra Summit September 9-11, 202
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.
- For more information, see Confidential computing for x86 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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