In fact, according to industry thought leaders, confidential computing is a transformational technology that will bulldoze barriers in cloud computing and open the public cloud up to sensitive data in industries like finance, healthcare, and manufacturing. By making it so that sharing data and sacrificing privacy don’t go hand-in-hand, confidential computing will unlock the potential of cloud computing to solve all kinds of real-world problems.

In an interview on The Peggy Smedley Show, Garry Binder, principal engineer and security architect at Intel, said the need to protect valuable assets is another reason companies are turning to confidential computing. “Imagine a company that spent $500 million producing a neural network model, a machine-learning model that does something that brings them to the forefront of the industry,” Binder said. “In those cases, they want to protect their asset, and that asset is their model. They also want to make sure that they are protecting the data. And so doing those evaluations, those analytics … within an enclave within protected memory, encrypted memory protects both the investment that the corporation has put into development of those technologies that led to those rapid insights, but also the privacy of the data and the protections of the data they have collected. So, protecting both of those things is really critical, and that’s what these technologies are designed to do.”

Additionally, cloud providers use technologies like TLS (transport layer security) to keep data in motion secure. However, before you can use your data for analytics, AI (artificial intelligence), or processing, you need to decrypt it. Confidential computing allows cloud providers and customers to plug this hole.”

Traditionally, if the cloud provider gets compromised, customer data may get exposed. With confidential computing, cloud providers are outside the trust boundary of the cloud provider, and, therefore, customer data is always private and controlled by the customer. As a result, Kumar says cloud providers have a big opportunity with confidential computing to attract sensitive workload that have eluded them in the past. “Confidential computing allows you to share your most sensitive data with others, even those outside your organization and be sure they can only use for the intended application and nothing else,” he adds. “It also allows you to use cloud without compromising on security and privacy.”

Source: Confidential Computing Consortium
A Technical Analysis of Confidential Computing v1.1

Dave Thaler is the chair of the Confidential Computing Consortium’s Technical Advisory Council and a software architect at Microsoft. Thaler says as threat vectors against network and storage devices are increasingly thwarted by the protections that apply to data in transit and at rest, attackers have shifted to targeting data in use. “The industry witnessed several high-profile memory scraping (incidents), such as the Target breach and CPU-side-channel attacks, which have dramatically increased attention to this third state, as well as several high-profile attacks involving malware injection, such as the Triton attack and the Ukraine power grid attack,” Thaler says.

“(And) as more data is stored and processed on mobile, edge, and IoT (Internet of Things) devices—where processing takes place in remote and often difficult-to-secure locations—the protection of data and applications during execution is increasingly important.”

“Confidential computing has the ability to keep data encrypted except while it’s getting processed, alleviating concerns about third-party access to data in use, thus removing cloud adoption barriers,” Cerf says. “By removing these barriers, we are enabling customers to realign their focus to other business priorities. We believe this transformational technology will help instill confidence that customer data is not being exposed to cloud providers or susceptible to insider risks.”

As the COVID-19 pandemic chapter in history begins to come to a close, workforces remain dispersed. “Confidential computing can help organizations process sensitive workloads in the cloud across geographies and with collaborators, despite cohabitation in the cloud with competitors, all while preserving the confidentiality of datasets,” Cerf explains. “Imagine, for example, being able to more quickly build vaccines and cure diseases as a result of this secure collaboration, all while preserving privacy of confidential health records.”

Confidential Computing in Industries

Customers across all industries are navigating the complexities of compliance and privacy in the cloud, especially those in regulated industries. Essentially, any company with intellectual property worth protecting and/or sensitive data are good candidates for confidential computing. “In every industry there are applications that have been inhibited from taking advantage of cloud computing,” Cerf says. “For example, the use cases we hear commonly from financial customers are around investment and wealth management applications, risk simulations, hedge funds trading algorithms to protect their IP and data. From healthcare customers we hear that confidential computing can help with clinical trial algorithms, medical devices as software, or patient management and patient data predictive analytics, and more.”

Mark Knight, director of architecture product management at Arm, says confidential computing takes the kind of high-trust, secure enclaves that have previously been accessible to only device manufacturers and operating system vendors and opens secure computing to all developers and all workloads, which can unlock the potential of technologies like AI that require the widespread mobility and use of data. “There’s a tension between the opportunity to use data wherever it adds value and the essential need to maintain confidentiality and privacy,” Knight says. “Confidential computing has the potential to reduce/remove that tension, unlocking the potential of data to solve pervasive real-world problems.”

Confidential computing will initially benefit every industry that processes or wishes to process sensitive or valuable data in a public or private cloud. However, as more areas of technology adopt cloud-native technologies, Knight expects confidential computing will spread rapidly to hybrid clouds, edge computing, automotive, and a broad range of personal devices.

Mike Bursell, chief security architect at Red Hat, says it’s difficult to think of industries that won’t benefit from confidential computing. “The most obvious initial use cases come from industries like banking and financial services, government and defence, whose raison d’être revolves around sensitive data,” Bursell says. “But once you start delving deeper, other industries such as telecommunications, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and energy spring to mind, and once you consider that almost every organization holds data, which is either sensitive to its customers or suppliers or is business-critical to its own operation, it becomes clear that confidential computing has the potential to benefit pretty much everyone.”

Manufacturing, too, will benefit from confidential computing. Arm’s Knight points out that in manufacturing, the remote deployment and operation of security-critical factory configuration and provisioning systems has long been a challenge. “Device manufacturers wish to ensure that their intellectual property is protected wherever their contract manufacturer builds their devices, as this can stop spread of counterfeit products. Strict controls over the manufacturing process are essential to ensure device and data security,” Knight explains. “When deployed within a manufacturing facility, confidential computing will help to prevent authorized access that might otherwise circumvent process controls and undermine device provisioning. The result is likely to be the more widespread adoption of secure manufacturing workflows at a lower cost to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers).”

Many manufacturers expected a slowdown in their digital strategies during the first few months of the COVID pandemic, Google’s Cerf says, but in reality, the opposite occurred—most Google customers accelerated their use of cloud-based services. “According to our research, three-fourths of surveyed manufacturers (76%) revealed that the pandemic has caused their companies to accelerate the use of digital enablers and disruptive technologies, such as cloud, AI, data analytics, robotics, 3D printing/additive manufacturing, Internet of Things, and augmented or virtual reality,” Cerf explains. “Manufacturing is a truly global undertaking. Today, manufacturers have to manage a new normal, which includes a distributed workforce and new digital methods. Technology has played a huge role in enabling business continuity for many manufacturers who have experienced disruption and decreases in workforce capacity and resources. Confidential computing can help manufacturers securely collaborate on sensitive workloads in the cloud across geographies all while preserving privacy and maintaining regulatory compliance.”