(Boursier.com) — At Confidential Computing Summit 2023, VMware, Inc Announces New Alliance with AMD, Samsung and RISC-V Keystone Ecosystem Members to Simplify Application Development and Operation Confidential Computing, which isolates and protects end-to-end data.
These industry leaders are coming together to facilitate this transition and contribute to the open source project Certifier Framework for Confidential Computing.
Growing support from the ecosystem
To democratize Confidential Computing, VMware has researched, developed and launched the developer-focused Certifier Framework for Confidential Computing open source project. With a neutral API to create and operate Confidential Computing applications in a standardized way, AMD, Samsung and VMware want to remove a significant barrier to the adoption of this model.
Confidential Computing is based on an emerging data processing concept called “Trusted Execution Environment” (TEE). The principle is to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of programs and data, even when workloads are deployed in the Cloud or on an infrastructure (eg Edge) likely to be exploited by others. As multi-cloud deployments become more widespread, uniform security mechanisms based on this approach should be increasingly important. Additionally, with the emergence of workloads such as machine learning, Confidential Computing can play a special role in protecting intellectual property and proprietary data related to models and codebases, derivations of proprietary models , and private training data. Although this concept represents a huge advance in terms of security and privacy, as with many hardware features, its large-scale adoption will first require a decomplexification of the application development process according to this new paradigm.
The Certifier Framework greatly simplifies the creation of more secure cloud workloads, sensitive information management services, and privacy management applications. This includes an emerging category of machine learning and “data economy” workloads that rely on sensitive data and aggregated models from a multitude of sources. The framework thus makes it possible to define and apply policies in order to better secure these workloads across internal and third-party infrastructures – including Edge Telco, multi-cloud environments, and sovereign clouds. By collectively advancing and contributing to this open source project, companies and members of the RISC-V Keystone community hope to concretely standardize their operations around a set of APIs designed for developers. All of this will benefit the entire industry by accelerating the adoption of Confidential Computing as it becomes available across x86, Arm and RISC-V ecosystems.
“Confidential Computing has enough potential to secure workloads whether they are hosted in multi-cloud or edge environments,” said Kit Colbert, CTO of VMware. “The challenge is to help customers adopt and implement this standard with ease. The collective efforts of the thriving ecosystem of Certifier Framework contributors will make these benefits accessible to ISVs, enterprise customers, and Sovereign cloud service providers will be able to use this emerging technology with greater simplicity and efficiency.”
VMware at Confidential Computing Summit 2023
Demonstrating VMware’s commitment to the future of multi-cloud security, the framework’s capabilities are showcased at the Confidential Computing Summit. VMware and other contributors to the project will provide relevant examples of applying this concept to machine learning workloads on client/cloud environments. These demos will showcase “universal” customer and cloud infrastructure security management capabilities built on a variety of TEEs – including AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) technologies, SGXn CCA and RISC-V.