Some of the biggest names in the industry-- including the likes of Google, IBM, Intel and Microsoft-- join the Linux Foundation to form the Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC), a community with a focus to advance trust and security for cloud and edge computing.
Initially the CCC has 10 members, namely Alibaba, Arm, Baidu, Google Cloud, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, Swisscom and Tencent. Eventually it will bring together hardware vendors, cloud providers, developers, open source experts and academics to accelerate what the Linux Foundation calls confidential computing, or the processing of encrypted data without exposing it to the rest of the system, reducing exposure for sensitive data and providing greater control and transparency for users.
“The earliest work on technologies that have the ability to transform an industry is often done in collaboration across the industry and with open source technologies,” the Linux Foundation says. “The CCC is a leading indicator of what’s to come for security in computing and will help define and build open technologies to support this trust infrastructure for data in use.”
The CCC already has a number of open source project contributions, such as the Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX), an SDK designed to help developers protect select code and data from disclosure or modification at the hardware layer via protected enclaves, and the Microsoft Open Enclave SDK allowing the building of Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) applications using a single enclaving abstraction.
The consortium does have a notable absentee-- Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon does have an open source initiative, but it has a rather testy relationship with the community, being often accused of "borrowing" the best of open source without giving back. As such, it might not have even received an invite for the CCC party, or simply refused it in the case it did.
