Big tech companies form Confidential Computing Consortium

The big tech companies of the world are coming together to form a Confidential Computing Consortium which will be dedicated to promoting confidential computing. The founding partners of this consortium are Intel, Microsoft, Google Cloud, Arm, Red Hat, IBM, Swisscom, Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent. The confidential computing organization will be hosted by the Linux Foundation.

Confidential computing has become increasingly relevant in today’s world as data security has increasingly become a primary concern. The consortium will give the world’s leading organizations a common platform to collaborate on data sets without giving access to data, gain insights and to innovate for the common prosperity. With the new consortium in place, the industry is now poised to come together to collaborate open source technology and frameworks to support brand new confidential computing scenarios.

To flag off the consortium’s work, Microsoft has committed to contribute the Open Enclave SDK to the Confidential Computing Consortium which will help enable broader industry collaboration with an open development approach. The Open Enclave SDK will give developers from all over the world a common enclave where they can build TEE-based applications. Among other contributions are Intel SGX and Red Hat Enarx from Intel and Red Hat respectively.

Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich welcomed the move from the tech companies and wrote on company blog: “We want to thank the Linux Foundation and all our industry partners for coming together to advance confidential computing. These technologies offer the promise to protect data and enable collaboration to make the world more secure and unlock multiparty innovations. Personally, I’m looking forward to seeing what we can all do together.”