Back when they worked at Red Hat, Mike Bursell and Nathaniel McCallum grappled with the challenges of confidential computing — isolating an organization’s most sensitive data in a secure enclave while processing it.
Confidential computing is of particular use to organizations that deal in sensitive, high value data — such as financial institutions, but also a wide variety of organizations.
Source: The New Stack
Link: https://thenewstack.io/confidential-computing-with-webassembly/
Although WebAssembly brings languages other than HTML, CSS and JavaScript to the browser, it’s not a JavaScript replacement and it takes a very different approach from Flash, Active X plugins and other techniques that encapsulated non-web code for browsers. Think of it as a small, fast, efficient and very secure, stack-based virtual machine that doesn’t care what CPU or OS it runs on, that’s designed to execute portable bytecode — compiled from code originally written in C, C++, Rust, Python or Ruby — at near-native speed. WebAssembly doesn’t only run in the browser: It started on the client, but is proving very useful on the server.
Source: The New Stack
Confidential computing technology protects data during processing. Exclusive control of encryption keys delivers stronger end-to-end data security in the cloud.
Source: IBM Cloud Learn Hub
Link: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/confidential-computing
As computing moves to span multiple environments—from on-prem to public cloud to edge computing—organizations need security controls that can safeguard sensitive intellectual property (IP) and workload data wherever the data resides. Highly regulated applications and mission critical applications need data protection through all its modalities—at-rest, in-transit and in-use, for companies to migrate the data to the cloud where there is a lack of control and visibility in a multitenant environment. As an industry we have generally figured out how to protect data at-rest, and, in-transit. Confidential Computing (CC) is an emerging industry paradigm focused on securing the data in-use.
Source: Intel IT Peer Network
Link: https://itpeernetwork.intel.com/confidential-computing/
Privacy and Confidential Computing Gains Momentum. Another approach to shoring up cybersecurity, particularly when addressing communications and data privacy, is confidential computing. The idea of confidential computing is to encrypt the entire computing process, not just the data, creating additional layers of security around sensitive information. Google, Microsoft, IBM, Alibaba, and VMware are helping develop new protocols and best practices by way of the Confidential Computing Consortium. The tech is still in a state of relative infancy, but we should begin to see confidential computing slide into the mainstream in 2021.
Source: Forbes
Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnewman/2020/09/21/top-10-digital-transformation-trends-for-2021/
Confidential computing — one of 33 technologies on the Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Security, 2020 — is a security mechanism that protects code and data from the host system. By making critical information invisible to third parties, including the host, it potentially removes the remaining barrier to cloud adoption for highly regulated businesses in the financial services, insurance and healthcare sectors.
Source: Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Security, 2020
When Nathaniel McCallum and I embarked on the project that is now called Enarx, we made one decision right at the beginning: the code for Enarx would be open source, a stance fully supported by our employer, Red Hat (see the standard disclaimer on my blog). All of it, and forever.
Source: Opensource.com
I believe that cloud computing will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where users can be confident that their software and data are not being exposed to cloud providers or unauthorized actors inside their own organizations. This approach will foster innovation, allowing organizations to adopt the latest cloud technologies and alleviate concerns when it comes to data privacy and compliance. When organizations, especially those in regulated industries, are ready to move workloads to the cloud, one of the biggest challenges is how to process sensitive data while still keeping it private. However, when data is being processed, there hasn't been an easy solution to keep it encrypted. Now there is. Confidential Computing is a breakthrough technology that encrypts data in use, while it is being processed.
Source: Dark Reading
Link: https://www.darkreading.com/cloud/why-confidential-computing-is-a-game-changer
Big tech companies are adopting a new security model called confidential computing to protect data while it’s in use
Source: IEEE Spectrum
Link: https://spectrum.ieee.org/what-is-confidential-computing
Wasm offers the sort of platform-independence and easy integration that security-conscious developers and enterprises are looking for.
Source: Opensource.com