Technology companies from America and across the world such as Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, Baidu, Red Hat, IBM, Intel, Swisscom, and Tencent have joined hands to form an open-source technology consortium related to Cloud Computing this week.
The objective of this group will be to accelerate the adoption of “Confidential Computing” where data inside the computer memory will be processed without exposing it to other apps, operating systems and cloud server tenants.
Furthermore, Linux Foundation is said to have agreed to work in establishing standards, frameworks, and tools to encrypt data from the operating system, hardware, applications, and online services.
“As privacy and security occupy prime importance for almost every single person on the globe who interacts with these systems every single day, Confidential Computing is said to help in coercing the objective to the core”, said Jim Zemlin, Executive director, Linux Foundation.
Use of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) also known as enclaves will be encouraged in the Confidential Computing scenario.
Technically speaking, Enclaves are used by cloud service providers to safeguard memory data being processed by cloud servers from other clients who often share computing resources from the same server.
Meaning the technology behind enclaves or TEEs will now be used as open-source computing tools on cloud platforms to safeguard any data spill.
Intel Software Guard Extensions Development Kit, Microsoft Open Enclave SDK, and Red Hat Enarx will be the tools used by the new consortium to protect data on hardware and software layers.
However, the indulgence of 3 Chinese companies- Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent have led to the raise of fresh Cybersecurity concerns among the other consortium participants.
