Welcome to the May 2026 Newsletter

TL;DR | What’s in This Issue?

The Confidential Computing Summit 2026 is locked in for June 23–24 in San Francisco, focusing on securing enterprise Agentic AI.
The TAC approved and published the “3 Degrees of Confidential Computing” white paper, establishing a 3-level stack-integration maturity model.
The Coconut SVSM project expanded its mission from securing confidential VMs to supporting broader, general confidential workloads.
Sweden’s Data Protection Authority (IMY) issued landmark, first-of-its-kind GDPR guidance on using TEEs for off-premises data processing.
A redesign of the CCC website landing page is currently underway and open for member feedback to improve user experience.
The 2026 Academic Research Grant program is wrapping up its open call, with applications officially closing on June 1st.
Digital marketing momentum spiked sharply in April, yielding a 64% increase in social media impressions and a 56% bump in engagement.

From the Executive Director

Hello Community Member,

One of key conferences in the Confidential Computing Calendar, Confidential Computing Summit, is just around the corner, starting on the 23rd June and I’m looking forward to meeting folks there, so if you’re attending, please let me know so we can get together. If you can’t wait that long for Confidential Computing content, or you’re based in Asia, then I’ll also be attending and speaking at Open Source India the week before. I’m not the only person speaking on Confidential Computing, and it’s great to see several topics making it onto a really packed schedule for the conference. Again, if you or anyone in your ecosystem will be attending, I’d love to meet up.

Last month also saw Consensus Miami, a blockchain, Web3 and decentralized computing conference. I was cheered to see the number of companies considering or actively employing Confidential Computing in this space, which looks set to become a real growth sector for CC. A workshop on Verification of AI Development in San Francisco highlighted how various technologies and techniques, including Confidential Computing, can be used to go beyond just securing AI use to allowing auditing and verification of AI at various points in the process. As the CCC’s work with regulators continues, we can expect to see interest in applying CC in a broadening set of situations and sectors.

From the Outreach Committee Chair

The CCC Outreach Committee continues preparations for Confidential Computing Summit 2026, taking place June 23-24 in San Francisco, California. The event will bring together industry leaders, technology experts, and the confidential computing community to discuss the latest developments in trusted execution environments, AI security, data protection, and confidential computing adoption.

This year’s theme, “Confidential Computing is the security layer that makes agentic AI deployable at enterprise scale” will include pre-event engagement via blogs, along with LinkedIn and X posts highlighting our upcoming webinar, “Agentic AI in the Wild: Rethinking Trust when your AI has the Keys” featuring experts from Edgeless Systems, Intel, and NVIDIA. Special thanks to Rachel Wan, our Vice Chair of Outreach for moderating this. Additional highlights and social engagement will cover our keynote and speakers, each of the panels we’re participating in, and CCC sessions. Stay tuned next month for exciting updates on how we increased engagement and drove thought leadership in June.

On a related note around increasing engagement from our target audience- we’re looking forward to seeing the next iteration of the CCC website landing page. The updated design incorporates member feedback and aims to improve visitor engagement, content discoverability, and the overall user experience. Members are invited to review the proposed changes and provide feedback.

April digital marketing performance showed strong momentum, with over 9,400 page views and 4,500 visitors to the CCC website. Social media impressions increased by 64%, while engagement grew by 56% compared to previous periods.

Outreach Resources

Post on CCC Jobs Board.
Subscribe to CCC Monthly Newsletter and submit content via content submission form.
Read CCC Blog Posts: submit your blog post ideas via content submission form
Use the Member Badge and link to the CCC Website.
Follow the CCC Events Calendar.

From the TAC

May was a productive forward-looking month for the TAC, with progress across both project oversight and technical guidance for enterprise adoption of confidential computing.

A great achievement was the completion and approval to publish the TAC’s “Three Degrees” paper. The document gives adopters a practical way to think about progressive levels of confidential computing integration: from enabling confidential infrastructure, to integrating attestation with enterprise systems, to using workload-specific identity and policy. During the final review, the TAC tightened the language to make clear that the third degree is a baseline for stronger adoption rather than the end of the journey. The group also clarified that confidential computing does not remove the need to reason carefully about the software inside the trust boundary: vulnerabilities in the workload, guest kernel, firmware, or other measured components remain part of the adopter’s security model.

The TAC also received the annual update for Coconut SVSM. The project has broadened its mission from providing secure services only to confidential virtual machines to supporting confidential workloads more generally. Coconut reported continued technical progress, including APIC and VSOCK support, KBS-based attestation support, kernel-thread infrastructure, boot-flow improvements, and better CI and security practices. The project also began monthly development releases in 2025 and reported increased contributor activity across a broad set of companies and research participants. Looking ahead, the project is focused on upstream KVM/QEMU “planes” support, persistence for services such as vTPM and UEFI variable storage, CocoonFS for encrypted and integrity-protected storage, and longer-term parvisor and lightweight-workload scenarios. The discussion also highlighted potential collaboration between Coconut and Gramine around running workloads with a smaller trusted computing base.

The TAC continued work on its enterprise adoption blueprints. The clean-room blueprint was reviewed as being close to final approval, with discussion around how to explain trust in both the clean-room business logic and the clean-room infrastructure itself. The TAC also reviewed early work on the attestation and key-release blueprint, including how to present attestation policy, replay-risk mitigations, enterprise integration points, implementation guidance, and mappings to common security and compliance controls. Members noted that some of this control-mapping work may be useful beyond a single blueprint and could become reusable guidance across CCC technical documents.

The TAC also began planning updates to existing CCC technical publications. The original TAC technical white paper is being refreshed ahead of the Confidential Computing Summit so that it better reflects the current state of confidential computing, including attestation and newer deployment patterns. The terminology paper was also identified for a broader update, particularly around confidential devices, GPUs, SmartNICs, composite TEEs, containerization, and evolving workload models.

Finally, the TAC held a technical discussion on threat modeling for confidential computing in public clouds. The discussion examined how the trust model has evolved from early SGX-style enclave deployments, where the cloud service provider could often be kept largely outside the attestation flow, to modern confidential VMs and accelerator-backed systems where CPUs, GPUs, platform firmware, cloud-provided components, and high-performance devices may all contribute evidence, endorsements, and reference values. This discussion reinforced the need for CCC guidance that clearly explains what confidential computing protects, what remains in scope for platform and workload owners, and how adopters should reason about trust boundaries in real cloud deployments.

As always, TAC meeting minutes, materials, and links to recordings are available in the CCC governance repository.

Recent News

Landmark GDPR Guidance on TEEs from Sweden’s IMY
- Sweden’s Data Protection Authority (IMY) has issued first-of-its-kind guidance regarding Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) for processing personal data off-premises. Developed alongside Volvo Group, Ericsson, and CanaryBit, this report marks the first European regulatory assessment of TEEs grounded in a real operational deployment scenario, providing much-needed regulatory clarity for cloud architecture. 👉 Read the IMY Guidance Blog Post
New White Paper: “3 Degrees of Confidential Computing”
- As confidential computing shifts from a niche security feature to a strategic imperative, its benefits depend entirely on stack integration depth. Led by Dan Middleton (NVIDIA / CCC Technical Advisory Council Chair), this new white paper defines a practical, 3-level maturity model to transition organizations from basic hardware isolation to full zero-trust workloads. 👉 Read the 3 Degrees White Paper (PDF)
Securing the Agentic AI Economy
- Traditional security frameworks assume human-driven data movement, but autonomous AI agents operate entirely differently. A new article highlights the widening gap in enterprise security as AI agents scale in production, stressing the need for verifiable trust layers. 👉 Read the AI Agent Security Article
2026 Academic Research Grant Program Open
- The CCC is officially accepting research proposals from university faculty. This year, up to two awards will be granted for practical research focused on scalability challenges, privacy applications (data sovereignty), and architecture hardening.
- Deadline: Applications close June 1, 2026. Recipients announced July 1.
- 👉 Submit a Proposal / View Guidelines