Google Goes All In on Confidential Computing

Google says “confidential computing” is key to better cloud security and data protection. And it’s doubling down on its open source confidential computing framework and urging the rest of the industry to follow suit.“It’s important to have industry collaboration,” said Brandon Baker, tech lead for cloud security at Google, on a call with reporters. “We really want to make this mainstream and part of the experience for cloud.”While the technology behind confidential computing is still in its infancy, it isn’t unique to Google. Some chipmakers already use this approach, also called trusted execution environments. These environments create a secure area on the main processor to protect select code and data from disclosure or modification.The challenge, however, is that most of these secure enclaves are hardware specific. And this means that apps running on Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) hardware, for example, don’t work in AMD or Arm environments.