In Today’s Issue
- From the Executive Director
- Outreach
- From the TAC
- Recent News
This month’s issue highlights several significant year-end milestones across the Consortium — from finalizing the 2026 budget to electing our next slate of Governing Board, TAC, and Outreach committee officers. November is always a pivotal planning period, and this year brings meaningful progress on strategic direction, resource allocation, and community-facing initiatives. We’re also closing out major projects, including our IDC research study, while preparing for a strong and globally connected 2026.
From the Executive Director
November brings two important sets of decisions for the Consortium each year: what our budget should look like and who should serve as officers of the Governing Board and our committees.
Over the past couple of years, the GB made the decision to run down our surplus (accrued mainly due to reduced activities during the Covid era), but this course of action is of course unsustainable and was always planned as a short-term measure. The Board has therefore spent much time over the past two months considering the various options available to the Consortium, supported with options (and many, many numbers!) from the supporting staff of the Linux Foundation, who, as ever, have been extraordinarily helpful.
By the time this newsletter reaches you, the final shape of the budget for 2026 should be complete and agreed, leaving us in a secure financial position not just for next year, but for the coming years after that.
Alongside the budget discussions, we’ve been running votes for the Chair and Vice-Chair positions of the Governing Board, TAC and Outreach committees. I’d like to welcome the following folks:
- Governing Board Chair: Nelly Porter (Google) – returning
- Governing Board Vice-Chair: Michael O’Connor (Nvidia)
- Governing Board General Member Representatives:
- Jens Albers (Fr0ntierX)
- Samuel Ortiz (Rivos Inc) – returning
- Manu Fontaine (Hushmesh) – returning
- TAC Chair: Dan Middleton (Nvidia) – returning
- TAC Vice-Chair: Ijlal Loutfi (Canonical)
- Outreach Chair: Laura Martinez (Nvidia)
We will hold an election for Outreach Vice-Chair to fill this final position. I’d like to thank not only the returning officers, but also outgoing officers: Emily Fox, Mike Ferron-Jones and Yash Mankad for their hard work over the past twelve months.
Outreach
In November, the Outreach committee focused on finalizing our research project with IDC and determining our optimal strategy for 2026. The IDC project titled, “Unlocking the Future of Data Security: Confidential Computing as a Strategic Imperative,” compiles results from 600 respondents in multiple countries. It reveals growing awareness of Confidential Computing, tested the attractiveness of over a dozen usages, and showed impediments that need to be addressed to support wider adoption. We are putting the finishing touches on it now, and plan to make it public in early December.
In 2026, Outreach plans to increase our global reach by optimizing event portfolio and investing new resources in online content marketing and promotion. Our events strategy will be designed to maintain strong relationships with our ecosystem members, but also grow new adopters via events affiliated with security and privacy technologies, and fertile various industry segments.
From the TAC
We initiated the 2026 strategic direction, prioritizing the creation and dissemination of technical blueprints, best practices, and reference architectures, aligning with the Governing Board’s direction. A key theme arising from this is the immediate need for improved documentation and “how to get started” guides. Separately, the TAC received the annual review for the Islet project. Islet is unique in our portfolio in supporting mobile devices.
We also discussed recent publications assessing Confidential Computing. Our documents may not reflect the shared responsibility model, where the Cloud Service Provider remains part of the TCB for physical security. The TAC will look at revising existing documents or adding new ones to make this aspect more clear.
Finally we decided on 2026 allocations for two projects: Veraison (Program Management), SPDM (Security Audit). The Governing Board subsequently approved a smaller budget and so we may need to revisit our plans here.
Please join us at our last meeting of the year, December 11th, where we will hear from colleagues in the CNCF CoCo community talk about Trustee. This attestation project might become a key enabler to help adopters use the variety of attestation services emerging in the ecosystem.
Recent News
- The Confidential Computing Consortium welcomes Confident Security as our newest Start-Up Member: Their work to make AI truly private, including OpenPCC, ohttp, bhttp, go-nvtrust, and more, directly supports our mission to advance open standards and adoption of Confidential Computing. Read the full announcement.
- Microsoft Announces Preview of Newest Confidential VMs: This month at Ignite, Microsoft announced the latest addition to the Azure Confidential Computing portfolio with the preview of Azure Confidential VMs powered by Intel® TDX on 5th Gen Xeon processors. These new Confidential VMs come equipped with AI acceleration built into the CPU with Intel® AMX technology. For confidential storage and other workloads that need a balance of SSD capacity, compute, and memory, these new VMs can be provisioned with high-performance NVMe drives, achieving nearly 5X more throughput while reducing latency by about 16% compared to the previous SCSI generation. Overall, Microsoft reports lower IO latency by ~27 microseconds across block size and thread count. These Confidential VMs are also the first to use the open-source paravisor, OpenHCL. General availability is expected in select North American and European regions in Q1 2026. Bosch, Thales, TDC Erhverv, and Arqit announced partnerships and endorsements as part of the reveal at Ignite. Read the full announcement.
- CanaryBit Selected for Regulatory Sandbox with Ericsson and Volvo Group: CanaryBit, Ericsson and Volvo Group are collaborating to increase road safety, and the Swedish Authority for Privacy and Protection (IMY) is investigating the business use-case in a regulatory sandbox. CanaryBit Confidential Cloud suite enables secure, real-time vehicle-to-infrastructure data without compromising individual privacy. The sandbox project will examine whether Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) can process road-infrastructure traffic data whilst preserving privacy. The outcome will refine regulations and accelerate privacy-first mobility innovations, a key step to unlocking the full potential of connected vehicles to create safer roads for everyone. This is a landmark moment, as it’s the first time a privacy authority has formally assessed TEEs as a Privacy Enhancing Technology.
Best regards,
The Confidential Computing Consortium
Let’s grow our community! Share this with your network.
