The Summit for All Things Confidential Computing

With the continuing expansion of data protection legislation, organizations must ensure compliance with legal obligations and organizational risk and compliance policies. In this session, learn how Confidential Computing supports controlled access to data for analysts working inside and outside the organizational boundary. The session will provide a contextual overview of the business requirement for confidential information retrieval, and details of how Confidential Computing is being used to protect regulated and classified data. A flexible and scalable architecture will be demonstrated, and comparisons provided to alternative solutions to the use-case requirement. The session will provide essential insights for data analysts, compliance officers, and those seeking to enhance the value of their available data assets.

While we can safeguard applications and data in memory using Intel SGX (Software Guard Extensions) or TDX (Trust Domain Extensions), ensuring the security of distributed AI workloads remains a complex challenge.

In this session, we will share our experience at ByteDance in developing end-to-end secure AI workloads utilizing Jeddak Sandbox and BigDL PPML. Our solution has been deployed in production for internal customers to build trusted AI applications on large-scale datasets.

Writing Digital Exams secured by Remote Attestation and Cloud Computing

Speaker: Thore Sommer, FHNW, Keylime Maintainer

Digital exams in schools and universities are getting more and more common. This talk we take a closer look at how we, the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW), solved many of the related challenges with Trusted Platform Module (TPM) based remote attestation and cloud computing.
During this we discuss the solutions that we found and challenges we faced to implement it in our exam system the Cloud Assessment Management Platform (CAMPLA).

From a No to On-the-Go! A Frontrunners Story on How We Introduced Confidential Computing in Telco

Speaker: Jonas De Troy, Domain Manager Public Cloud & Edge at Proximus

The introduction of emerging technologies is always a difficult task in larger sized companies, true for all organisations and relevant for regulated industries. We will articulate a use case to show the process from a no-go – to an on-the-go decision. We will show how technology, vision and legal/compliance need to collaborate to prove added value. As a domain manager for Public Cloud & Edge I had the opportunity to live this process from early concept to how we introduced confidentiality.

Collaborative Account Recovery for End-to-End Encryption Systems

Speakers: Ravi Ravikanth, VP of Engineering, PreVeil Inc. & Mike Blaguszewski, Lead Backend Engineer

In this presentation we will describe method that uses of secure enclaves to recover user keys in Preveil’s end-to-end encrypted system.

CC for AI/ML Models: A Comprehensive Security Framework for In-Use Protection, Ownership, and Data

Speaker: Jay Chetty, Cloud Security Architect, Confidential Computing, Intel

As AI/ML models increase in value and application across sectors, their protection becomes paramount. These models, which often demand substantial investment for training and optimization, face threats of tampering and theft. Furthermore, data used for inference holds significant business value and is often subject to regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA. This AI/ML Security Framework offers a protective layer to these models. It secures models at rest, during transit, and at run time, ensuring integrity, confidentiality, and control over their usage. It introduces model ‘ownership’ and the concept of model licensing, allowing developers to monitor deployment and potentially revoke a model’s use if misbehavior or critical flaws are detected. The framework applies cryptographic techniques and Intel Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to protect models. TEE attestation, used in licensing, is facilitated via Secure Boot and Intel Platform Trust Technology or SGX-based DCAP. The model’s protection is extended to data streams used for various AI/ML analytics and output results. Designed for AI/ML specialists with limited security expertise, this framework is delivered with a set of easy-to-use tools and is open-sourced, compatible with Linux KVM (VT-x), Intel SGX (with Gramine), and Kubernetes Containers.

Learn how to deploy confidential pods on public clouds using Cloud API Adaptor (CAA), a sub-project of the Confidential Containers project. This open-source project enables the creation of CVMs on public clouds by integrating with Kubernetes and kata-containers. In this talk, we’ll discuss the technical details of CAA, its integration with k8s,the challenges of deploying pods to k8s using this non-obvious approach, attestation on the respective hardware used to power these virtual machines, etc.

An Open, Platform-Neutral Approach to Attestation

Speaker: Paul Howard, Principal System Solutions Architect at Arm

Attestation is one of the pillars on which confidential computing rests. A compute environment needs to prove its confidential characteristics before workloads can be executed. Methods of attestation are often platform-specific, leading to fragmentation as more confidential platforms and architectures emerge. This session shows how open-source, platform-neutral, standards-based abstractions can be applied in this space, and invites the community to collaborate and invest in them.