Tech Firms Form Consortium For Data Protection

The Linux Foundation has announced that it will be forming a consortium dedicated to boosting the adoption of confidential computing.

Companies including Alibaba, Arm, Baidu, Google Cloud, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, Swisscom and Tencent will join forces on the Confidential Computing Consortium to collaborate on open source technologies and standards that aim to accelerate the adoption of confidential computing.

“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,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation, in a press release. “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.”

The Confidential Computing Consortium will bring together hardware vendors, cloud providers, developers, open source experts and academics to achieve such milestones as influencing technical and regulatory standards, and building open source tools to provide the right setting for Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) development. In addition, the organization will be in charge of industry outreach and education initiatives.

“To help users make the best choice for how to protect their workloads, they need to be met with a common language and understanding around confidential computing,” said Royal Hansen, vice president of Security at Google. “As the open source community introduces new projects like Asylo and OpenEnclave SDK, and hardware vendors introduce new CPU features that change how we think about protecting programs, operating systems, and virtual machines, groups like the Confidential Computing Consortium will help companies and users understand its benefits and apply these new security capabilities to their needs.”

Added Fei Song, head of product committee, AI Cloud, Baidu: “The formation of Confidential Computing Consortium under Linux Foundation is an important step towards the future of technologies across cloud computing, blockchain and security. It will help to create the global technical standards of confidential computing and promote its business use at the enterprise level in different industries.”

The consortium also plans to host several technical open source projects and open specifications to support confidential computing.