Dr. Nigel Edwards

So we started looking at what it would mean to secure a memory fabric.

And then we became aware of other developments in other companies because a lot of technology advances actually takes place by collaborating between multiple companies.

This led

to discussions with the industry around how you secure memory fabrics.

And it led eventually to a protocol called SPDM, which stands for Security Protocol and Data Model.

And this is the protocol in confidential computing which runs between CPUs and GPUs so that the two entities can authenticate each other.

And the data passing between a confidential computing environment in a CPU and a confidential computing environment in a GPU is protected by authenticated encryption.

Several HPE employees were named on the first author of SPDM, and I can trace our contribution to that right the way back to the work we were doing on the machine and memory-driven computing.

We continue to work within the community.

We're collaborating today with our partner suppliers within the ecosystem.

We're collaborating with the Confidential Computing Consortium, which is an industry consortium established to promote confidential computing in 2019.

So SPDM is relatively new.

That's only been around for a few years.

And actually, it's not even fully in silicon today.

It's coming.

There have been announcements from various vendors where SPDM is being deployed in silicon to enable this.

The technology is still evolving, still maturing.

I don't think today there's an easy button for confidential computing.

And there are services that need to be put in place.

There's tooling that needs to be put in place to construct a confidential virtual machine, which we are working towards.