First session, and I wanted to explain a bit more, give an overview of the fields, right,
for those learning.
So I'm Nick Vidal.
Part of the Anarchs Community Manager at Anarchs, it's part of the Confidential Computing
Consortium.
It's an open source project.
I'm also serving as the chair of the Outreach Committee from the Confidential Computing
Consortium, and it's a pleasure to be here.
So let's start out with talking about the states of data protection.
This is very basic.
I mean, everybody knows about protecting data arrests, protecting data in transit, but now
protecting in use, this is something that is relatively new.
So what exactly is protecting data arrests?
When you have your hard drive encrypted, your laptop, your traveling, you get lost, that
data is safe as long as your hard drive is encrypted and nobody can get in there.
In transits, when you open up your browser and you just type HTTPS and you access some
website, the data that's flowing between your browser and the server, if that's using HTTPS,
that's encrypted and nobody can tamper into that data.
That's secure.
However, there's a third way that the data can also be accessible, and that's directly
on the CPU.
This is something that people mostly are not aware of, developers, even security professionals,
and they are not aware that when you have some type of application or data running at
the CPU in memory, if for some reason that system is compromised, somebody can get access
to that data.
Suppose that there's an exploits, somebody gains root access, they'll be able to see
what's in memory, and conflict computing allows you to encrypt data while in use, while in
the CPU.
Even if somebody breaks down, even if somebody gains access, roots access to that system,
they won't have access to that data because it's just like the hard drive example.
It's just like the data in transit example.
Confidential computing protects data and the codes, both confidentiality and integrity.
Confidentiality means you cannot actually read the data, and integrity, you cannot
mess up a tamper with that data or with that code.
For conflict computing to have, to achieve conflict computing, you have to at least provide
data confidentiality, data integrity, and codes integrity.
How about codes confidentiality?
As part of the conflict computing consortium's definition of conflict computing, that's not
necessary, but some projects like the NRX projects, we provide that, all those protections.
This is the official definition by the conflict computing consortium, conflict computing protects
data in use by performing computation in a hardware-based, attested, trusted...
Manage sensitive and regulated data.
I wanted to read that because the CCC worked, a whole bunch of group of people worked together
during one year to define this definition and another year to add one word, attested.
I wanted to read very clearly to make this definition, so I wouldn't make a mistake,
right?
I don't want to memorize and forget something.
What's conflict computing, what's the case study, where can it be used?
Actually it has many uses, right now we have some sectors that are very much regulated,
they have a lot of sensitive data, and in fact they cannot use the clouds as of today.
They simply can't, policies won't allow them to benefit from the clouds.
So we have for example banking, financial services, insurance, of course they have a
lot of sensitive financial data.
We also have healthcare, there's the HIPAA, for example in the US it's a regulation regarding
healthcare.
We have telecom, Edge, IoT, governments, a whole bunch of sectors that currently do
not use the clouds because they can't, because they have a lot of sensitive data, because
it's very much regulated by governments, policies.
So conflict computing will open the clouds, the IoT, the Edge to these sectors, they have
a lot of sensitive data, and that's the huge potential of this technology.
If we can open up this, the clouds to these sectors, you'll grow a lot.
That's why, one of the reasons why cloud service providers are currently, this year and this
past year, they have offered conflict computing and this is going to grow immensely.
So I talked about the conflict computing consortium, we are part of the Linux foundation,
so we bring together hardware vendors like Intel, AMD, ARM, NVIDIA, cloud service providers
like Azure, Google Clouds, and so many others, startups as well, and software developers.
We have a whole bunch of members here, as you can see, all the major players are betting
on this, because in some ways, this is the future of the clouds in terms of security,
and currently we have seven open source projects.
We invite as many open source projects, if you are working with conflict computing and
you have a nice project, we welcome you to the CCC.
So I work at the Anarchs, but we have Grammy, we have Veracruz, Verasome, a lot of very
great technology here, which is fully open source.
Now let's step back and look at the Let's Encrypt movement.
Not many people are aware of conflict computing and its importance of protecting data while
in use.
If we go back 10, 15 years ago, that was the same challenge that we had regarding protecting
data in transits.
People were like, hey, I'm not an e-commerce, I'm not like a bank, or why should I use HTTPS?
We kind of left right now, hey, HTTPS is just the default, right?
It's very easy.
Why we shouldn't have this as the default?
Even from whatever, you have your own blog, it doesn't have any sensitive data, but even
so, you're going to use HTTPS because it's easy, it's convenient, and it's just more
secure.
This same mindset is what we need, and what we need to change for people to start really
thinking about data in use, of protecting data in use, and it will make everything so
much secure.
It doesn't matter if your system gets hacked, if everyone has roots access to it, even so,
it's not game over, your data is still secure.
We hear in the news all the time about all the vulnerabilities, and this could have been
prevented by using conflict computing.
So Lens Encrypt, it was started in 2012 by four people, two from Mozilla, one from the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, and from the University of Michigan.
It's the world's largest certificate authority, it provides free TOS encryption, and the Goish
really make the web safer using HTTPS.
They have a lot of sponsors and partners, as I mentioned, you're part of the Lens Foundation
helps them, is a partner, also the Mozilla Foundation, EFF, there's a whole group of
people that see the importance of having HTTPS by default today.
What makes it possible is that they have developed software that's very easy to use that makes
it just, it's a very easy process to enable HTTPS.
So they have the ACMA protocol, and they have those who have provided open up search bots,
you know what that is, that's the Python application that creates a certificate rights, and on
the server side they have Boulder.
And these technologies, this software, and this protocol, they make it really easy to
achieve HTTPS by default.
So I'm not sure if you can see really well here, the contrast is not really good, but
you can see the growth here.
So this is the-
It's quite well on the stream if you happen to have a device.
So this is the start of the project, I can't actually see the ears here, but as you can
see it's growing right, it has grown a lot, especially here, I'm not sure what happened
here, but this is how many certificates they have given rights, and so it's very successful
Let's Encrypt is one of the most successful achievements to help secure the web.
And how did they accomplish this?
What can the Confidential Computing community learn from the Let's Encrypt movements?
So here are some key ideas that I thought about, but you can also explore this, and
this can be an open discussion as well.
So first of all, make a campaign that brings this awareness around the importance of encrypting
data while in use, the same way that Let's Encrypt did this for data in transits.
For us, HTTPS is just the default way.
We can't think of any other way of doing this.
Why would we use HTTPS only, right, even for a blog or whatever?
It just makes sense.
So adoption by TES, by Cloud Service Providers, this is happening right now, so all the major
Cloud Service Providers are really making this available, generally available, and they
should, they're a bit expensive right now, but they should become more affordable in
the future.
Of course, all the hardware developers, they have made the technologies available.
So Intel, ARM, ARM is still going to release this, but you have AMD as well.
They have invested a lot, sometimes even a decade, right, in terms of Intel SGX.
We have to develop software that makes it really easy to deploy computer computing.
So one of the projects is NRX, we make it really easy, we use WebAssembly to allow developers
to deploy applications, and it's really nice if you want to check that out.
We have to abstract the complexities, complex computing is really complex.
You have to know about encryption, you have to learn about attestation, about the different
models that exist to achieve computer computing, and the software has to abstract all those
complexities if you want to gain a market share, right?
It has to be CSP neutral, it has to be hardware neutral, preferably the developer doesn't have
to know if his application is going to run on AMD or Intel or whatever.
But it just should work, he's going to deploy this application and complex computing will
just, everything will be encrypted and he doesn't have to care about attestation or whatever.
Just works, just like let's encrypts.
Promotes open source software, I believe open source plays a very important role here, and
the complex computing consortium has this as part of its mission to promote open source
software, that's why we adopted setting open source projects here.
We have to make it affordable, and right now it's very niche, but we have to see that maybe
in five years, this is just going to be the default way, right?
And maybe eventually it might even be free.
So we want to commoditize complex computing at some points, right, to make this a reality
by default.
And so with that, I would like to thank you for hearing me.
You can get in touch with us at the complex computing consortium using this email.
And I invite you to join our tech meetings, it happens every other week.
And also our outreach meetings, if you want to really learn or share your ideas, your
technical ideas, I recommend joining the tech committee and outreach if you want to expand
this idea and promote it.
So thank you very much, and that's it.
Do we have some time for questions?
Yes, the first block is a little bit cramped, so there's a little bit less time for questions
in the first block.
But can you feel to ask some, and I think you're also around for the rest of the day
to answer any questions?
So with TLS, I have the feeling that the infrastructure was already there, and it was just a problem
of it was too complicated, and with confidence in computer computing as a developer, I don't
really even know where to start.
The infrastructure is coming, the CSPs, they're really adopting computer computing.
We had heard some announcements, especially last year, of making this technology generally
available, but really the prices need to drop, it must make it really easy for people to
adapt this.
I currently can't use it on my laptop, for example.
But confidence computing is mostly targeted for the server side, or the Edge, or IoT.
There are some, the Intel SGX for the PC or for the laptop, in fact, they were kind of
degraded.
Intel is not supporting this anymore, but yeah.
So once I get West, Andrew, the next speaker could maybe already set up while we have the
next question.
Maybe go ahead.
Go ahead.
Thank you for a very nice talk.
You were talking about the definition of confidential computing, the confidential computing concerns
you had decided on, and you mentioned that it was one year to add a test to this definition.
So why was that, why wasn't it there in the first place?
Yeah, so attestation was not part of the first definition.
The reason why is because attestation is really complex, and maybe it wasn't given as much
importance as before, but once attestation became a really big discussion after, and
in fact they created a special interest group around attestation, and that's when they decided
to add a test to this definition.
Okay.