TL;DR | What’s in This Issue?
- From the Executive Director: Call for increased conference participation and a reminder that CCC technical meetings are open to everyone.
- Outreach Update: Capitalizing on a 15.6% traffic increase with new technical content pipelines, a curated news page, and upcoming global events.
- TAC Update: Advancements in TWIC, CCAF, and Agentic AI, alongside updates from recent grant recipients and 35 new proposals.
- Recent News: The CCC released the Collaborative Confidential Clean Room (CCCR) Blueprint, alongside ecosystem updates from Meta, Google Cloud, VAST Data, IONOS, NEAR AI, Red Hat, and OPAQUE.
From the Executive Director
Hello Community Members,
In this month’s newsletter, I want to focus on two topics: conferences and community engagement. The first is to encourage you to think about conferences you’re aware of and whether members of the community should be speaking at them or attending them. The Outreach Committee coordinates the various conferences that the CCC sponsors – and always welcomes members and non-members to provide their thoughts about which we should be prioritising – but there are many, many conferences and summits around the world where there’s little discussion of Confidential Computing, but there should be. Is there a conference that you typically attend or sponsor, or even organise, where there may be opportunities for speaking slots or panels? If so, please get in touch. I’m always happy to provide thoughts or materials for those looking to speak at conferences and often to submit sessions where applicable. Equally, if you’re looking to put together a panel, there are often many willing participants among our members who may be able to provide insightful and engaging points of view. The CCC and its members are a great resource for your conference – and we’re also excited to let people know about conferences which already do have a Confidential Computing focus or track.
Thinking of the CCC as a set of members and participants also reflects a trend that I’ve seen of increasing interest in our technical committee meetings and SIGs. If you’re already a member or participant, please remind interested potential participants that they don’t need to be members of the CCC to attend most of our meetings: we welcome anyone who wants to participate in accordance with our Code of Conduct. If you’re interested, but haven’t yet attended, please come along, or get involved via our mailing lists or Slack channels! You’ll find details about all of our working groups and channels for engagement here. You can also find recordings of the vast majority of our meetings on the Confidential Computing Consortium YouTube channel. Our mission is to promote Confidential Computing, and although we believe that membership of the CCC is a great way to further that goal, all are welcome to engage with our work.
From the Outreach Committee Chair
Interest in confidential computing continues to grow, with CCC website visitors up 15.6% year over year. Technical content is attracting the most traffic, and AI assistants are emerging as a new referral source. To keep that momentum going, we’re building a steady pipeline of technical articles and invite members to share their expertise, practical insights, and use cases.
We’re also developing a curated industry news page to make confidential computing developments from around the world easier to follow. This effort will support news sharing across the CCC website, LinkedIn, and monthly newsletter.
Upcoming industry events include October’s Open Source Summit, Linux Security Summit, and LF Member Summit in Prague, along with OSS Japan and RSA North America. These events offer opportunities to explore emerging trends, exchange ideas, and connect with industry peers.
Get involved: Share a technical blog post, submit a newsletter announcement, or post open roles on the CCC jobs board. Your contributions help inform and connect the broader confidential computing community.
As a reminder, the Outreach Resources below provide additional opportunities to engage with the CCC:
- 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.
- Reminder to fill out the CC Summit Feedback Survey
From the TAC Chair
The TAC advanced several ongoing initiatives this month. Mark Novak (JP Morgan Chase) announced that the Trustworthy Workload Identity (TWIC) task group submitted a major draft to the IETF RATS Working Group, proposing an architecture allowing any confidential workload to acquire credentials seamlessly. Solomon Cates (Google) continued driving the Confidential Compute Assurance Framework (CCAF), a vendor-agnostic framework for standardizing TEE terminology across regulators, manufacturers, and implementers — now migrated to a Linux Foundation-hosted document. In the Agentic AI white paper, Rene Kolga (Google) pushed for sharper focus on agent-specific benefits such as tool integrity to prevent “rag pool” attacks and clean memory reset via TEE shutdown.
The TAC also hosted presentations from CCC research grant recipients. David Oswald and Qifan Wang (Durham University) presented work on side-channel leakage in LLMs running across CPU TEEs paired with NVIDIA H100 Confidential GPUs, targeting KV-cache-related leakage sources with plans to publish results from a full TDX/SEV + H100 test environment. Chenghong Wang and Hiroki Chen (Indiana University) presented a verifiable data governance system featuring a formally-verified Rust monitor that enforces information-flow-control policies inside confidential VMs at a higher privilege level than the guest kernel, achieving 83–95% of native performance on Redis benchmarks. Yanzi Lin (Carnegie Mellon) described an interview study on confidential computing adoption barriers in biomedical research and is seeking introductions to industry contacts with healthcare experience. Jens Alberts (Fr0ntierX), with collaborators from MITRE, Invary, and Hushmesh, presented a continuous remote attestation framework built on RFC 9334 (RATS) that extends beyond launch-time attestation to continuously verify platform state, software provenance, and runtime behavior — open for public review through end of September. Mingshen Sun (TikTok) reported that the CCC research grant program received 35 proposals this cycle, with thanks to Fritz Alder (NVIDIA) for helping review submissions.
Recent News
- The Confidential Computing Consortium released The Collaborative Confidential Clean Room (CCCR) Blueprint, edited by Rene Kolga (Google) and Mingshen Sun (TikTok). The publication addresses vulnerabilities in legacy data clean rooms, where software isolation and legal agreements leave active runtime state vulnerable to infrastructure administrators and memory inspection, by anchoring security in hardware-backed TEEs and cryptographic attestation to keep data encrypted throughout execution.
- Meta is extending Private Processing to AI glasses, using Confidential Computing to process personal context in protected cloud environments designed to keep user data inaccessible to Meta and infrastructure operators.
- Google Cloud announced general availability of Intel TDX support for C4 standard virtual machines, expanding the options for organizations to protect sensitive workloads while data is being processed.
- VAST Data introduced DataEnclave, built on NVIDIA Confidential Computing to bring proprietary AI models and sensitive enterprise data together in hardware-isolated environments. The capability is currently in preview, with availability planned for Q1 2027.
- Google Cloud announced general availability of Confidential Space on NVIDIA H100 GPUs with Intel Trust Authority attestation, enabling organizations to verify the identity, hardware, and software state of the environment running their sensitive AI workloads.
- IONOS Cloud launched Confidential VMs powered by AMD SEV-SNP, using AMD EPYC Turin processors to protect data in use and support cryptographic attestation of workloads.
- NEAR AI made its confidential inference available through SayGm, connecting a gateway running inside an Intel TDX enclave with protected model execution and hardware attestation.
- Red Hat published a confidential containers architecture with Arqit, combining hardware-isolated workloads on OpenShift with attestation and quantum-safe networking to protect sensitive SaaS data.
- Red Hat and Duality detailed how confidential containers support sovereign AI, using hardware backed trusted execution environments to protect AI workloads and sensitive data during collaborative processing.
- OPAQUE introduced Weight Custody Manifest, extending its confidential AI infrastructure to protect model weights on customer-controlled infrastructure. The open standard lets model providers verify where their models can be unlocked.
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