Ten tech heavyweights, including Microsoft, Alibaba, Google, Intel and Tencent, announced Wednesday, August 21, 2019 the creation of the Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC), hosted by the Linux Foundation.
Ten tech giants announced Wednesday (August 21st) the formation of the Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC). It includes the Chinese Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu, the US Google Cloud, IBM, Microsoft, Intel and Red Hat, the Swisscom Helvetian and the British ARM.
They are coming together for what will be concretely "an open source community dedicated to defining and accelerating the adoption of Confidential Computing", explains in a blog post Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure. The CCC will be hosted by the Linux Foundation, which also spoke on the subject at the Open Source Summit, which is currently being held in San Diego.
SECURE CLOUD DATA DURING THEIR EXECUTION
"Until now, the cloud sector has focused on securing data at rest and in transit," the partners say. The CCC will therefore focus on the protection of data in use, within an application or a web browser, for example, which it considers to be currently "the most sensitive". The work developed by the CKC is focused on establishing standards and tools for end-to-end data encryption.
"This means that the data should not be visible in unencrypted form during the calculation, except for the code that is allowed to access it," says Microsoft, "which may mean that they are not even accessible to service providers. public cloud or edge computing ". The CCC already includes proprietary data security tools, such as Intel Software Guard Extensions, Microsoft Open Enclave SDK and Red Hat Enarx, for application developers.
The alliance between these tech heavyweights, especially Chinese and American groups, is a good sign in this context of economic war for most American media. "The challenges of cybersecurity are global," concludes Mark Russinovich. The absence of Amazon Web Services, the world leader in the cloud, of this consortium, however, is not trivial. But the consortium does not exclude the arrival of other companies thereafter.
