What is Confidential Computing?

Confidential computing protects data in use by performing computations in a hardware-based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). It ensures that data remains encrypted even while being processed, protecting it from the cloud provider and other tenants.

Three States of Data

At Rest

Stored data
Disk encryption
Well-established

In Transit

Network transmission
TLS/SSL
Well-established

In Use

Being processed
Confidential computing
Emerging technology

Trusted Execution Environments

Hardware TEEs

Intel SGX
AMD SEV
ARM TrustZone
AWS Nitro Enclaves

Key Features

Isolation Code and data isolated from OS/hypervisor.

Attestation Verify TEE authenticity.

Encryption Data encrypted in memory.

Sealing Persist encrypted data.

Use Cases

Multi-party computation
Secure cloud processing
Healthcare data analysis
Financial services
AI/ML on sensitive data

Challenges

Performance overhead
Limited memory
Development complexity
Side-channel attacks

Adoption

Cloud Providers

Azure Confidential Computing
AWS Nitro Enclaves
Google Confidential VMs

Consortium Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC)