Originally reported by TechTimes. Published August 2019.
What Is the Confidential Computing Consortium?
In August 2019, Microsoft announced it was joining Google Cloud, Intel, IBM, Alibaba, Arm, Baidu, Red Hat, Swisscom, and Tencent to establish the Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC). The group was formed under the stewardship of The Linux Foundation with the goal of improving how sensitive data is protected during processing — not just when it is stored or transmitted.
The Consortium aims to bring together a broad set of stakeholders including hardware vendors, software developers, cloud providers, academics, and open source contributors. By working collaboratively across the industry, members hope to define open standards and accelerate the adoption of confidential computing technologies.
Why Confidential Computing Matters
Traditional data security approaches typically protect data in two states:
- Data at rest — encrypting data stored on disk or in a database.
- Data in transit — encrypting data moving across networks (e.g., via TLS).
However, a third state — data in use — has historically been much harder to protect. When an application processes data, that data typically must be decrypted in memory, creating a window of exposure. Confidential computing addresses this gap by enabling encrypted data to be processed inside a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) without exposing it to the rest of the system — including the operating system, hypervisor, or cloud provider infrastructure.
According to The Linux Foundation’s statement at the time of the Consortium’s formation, closing this gap is critical to providing a fully encrypted data lifecycle for sensitive workloads in cloud and edge computing environments.
“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 Confidential Computing Consortium 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.”
— Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, The Linux Foundation
Open Source Projects Contributed to the Consortium
A key part of the Consortium’s mission is advancing open source standards. At launch, member organizations contributed several existing projects to the effort:
Open Enclave SDK (Microsoft)
Microsoft contributed the Open Enclave SDK, an open source framework that allows developers to build Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) applications using a single, unified enclaving abstraction. Rather than writing separate code paths for each TEE architecture, developers can build once and target multiple hardware TEE implementations. Mark Russinovich, Microsoft’s Chief Technical Officer, noted at the time that the Open Enclave SDK had already gained traction among developers working on TEE-based applications, and that contributing it to the Consortium would broaden access and accelerate adoption.
Software Guard Extensions (SGX) SDK (Intel)
Intel contributed its Software Guard Extensions (SGX) SDK, a development toolkit that allows application developers to protect selected code and data from modification or disclosure at the hardware level. SGX uses isolated memory regions called enclaves to enforce this protection, even in the presence of a compromised OS or hypervisor.
Enarx (Red Hat)
Red Hat contributed Enarx, a project designed to simplify the deployment of applications inside TEEs. Enarx abstracts the underlying hardware TEE implementation, making it easier for developers to run workloads confidentially without needing deep expertise in any specific TEE technology.
Broader Impact for Cloud and Edge Computing
The formation of the Confidential Computing Consortium reflects a broader industry recognition that cloud and edge computing introduce new threat surfaces — particularly around multi-tenant environments where workloads from different organizations share the same physical hardware. Confidential computing provides a technical foundation for ensuring that cloud providers, infrastructure operators, and other parties cannot access a tenant’s data even while it is being processed.
For DevOps and platform engineering teams, this has practical implications: workloads handling regulated or sensitive data — such as financial records, healthcare data, or cryptographic keys — may eventually be deployable in shared cloud environments with stronger hardware-backed isolation guarantees than software-only controls provide.
The Confidential Computing Consortium continues to operate under The Linux Foundation. For up-to-date information on its projects and membership, visit the official Confidential Computing Consortium website.
This article is based on reporting from TechTimes and announcements from The Linux Foundation, dated August 2019.