Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, Michael.
Hello, Sam. You got married recently. Congratulations, by the way. Now, I assume you had a bachelorette party, or as I would call it here in the UK, a hen party. How much did you know about what was happening?
I knew we were having a party. I knew the location, like the general location, but I didn't know any of the details of what my bridal party had actually planned for me. I didn't want to know. I told them to surprise me.
Yeah, I had the same thing. I had a snag deal, a bachelor party, and got blindfolded and bundled into a car. I had no idea what was going on.
Well, in the same way that you and I didn't have much information as to what was going on within our respective bachelor and bachelorette parties, today we are exploring different levels of access to information within our organizations, although in this case, it's to do with data protection. I'm Michael Bird.
I'm Sam Jarrell, and welcome to Technology Now from HPE.
Well, Sam, this is our second episode in our mini-series in collaboration with HPE Labs, celebrating 60 years of innovation.
That is right. Last time we looked into the practicalities of quantum computing and how you would integrate it into our current computing architecture. And of course, we will link to that episode in the show notes.
Yep. And this time we are exploring the world of confidential computing. Very interesting. A way to keep your data secure from threats, both external and internal.
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Chapter 2: How does confidential computing protect data during processing?
Similar to how there are regulatory requirements for handling the credit card information. Like it all sort of form part of that.
It will be form part of that. And if you're not using it, then you won't be in compliance with the regulations.
Do you foresee a world where this just becomes the standard way organizations just go about managing data?
We will get to the point where the default will be that this is turned on when you create virtual machines. And also price of containers as well. It's using the same underlying technology, but for deploying virtual machines or deploying container workloads. the confidential computing capability will just be turned on. And developers and system users, they won't even be aware it's turned on.
Are we at the stage where actually there isn't a particularly big resource overhead?
I think the good thing is that the encryption algorithm that's used for this is AES. And AES can be accelerated very efficiently by silicon. So today, when we've got the hardware acceleration in place, the overhead we're measuring is an order of a few percent, 1%, 2% for most workloads, maybe 5%, sort of worst case. But you require the hardware acceleration, the capabilities in the silicon.
I mentioned that SPDM is not fully in the silicon yet. So we're having to basically emulate that in software. So there you're seeing an overhead, therefore, of 10 to 20%. But that will go in the next generation of silicon. So in a couple of years' time, that will be back down to order of 1%, 2%, which is negligible. You won't notice it.
Okay. So what measures are put in place so people will trust a confidential computing environment?
The foundation of confidential computing is something called a trusted execution environment. When a trusted execution environment starts, the process enters a special state and measures that. That measurement is signed by a private key that's known only to the processor. That private key is certified by the vendor, and that measurement can be made available by the trusted execution environment
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Chapter 3: What problems does confidential computing address in data security?
Yeah, so the concept is that data is encrypted at rest and data is encrypted in transit. But where it's not encrypted is when that data is being processed or often isn't encrypted when that data is being processed. And that's where that data can be vulnerable. And there is particularly internal vulnerabilities.
So if there is sysadmin that falls victim to a phishing attack, or if there's just somebody internally that has malicious intent, they can then potentially get access to that data that's being processed. It's interesting because it's not something that I thought about.
And I think one of the things Nigel said, this will be the default, like this would basically become a regulatory requirement if you're handling that sort of data.
Yeah, it seems like it gets more and more difficult every single day to secure anything. We've had some episodes where we've even talked about quantum cryptography, right?
It seems as though this is just like table stakes, though, is the assumption that you need to be like doing absolutely everything possible to protect your data, not just from like bad actors, but from yourself to some degree, because even your own people can be weak points in your infrastructure and in your organization.
you made the right point zero trust like the thing with zero trust is you go for a trust no one and you provide access as and when it's needed and it's sort of a similar concept to this of just because they're a sysadmin just because they have elevated privileges doesn't necessarily mean they need access to that data because if they have access to it then other people could have access to it and really it's about making sure that environment is as secure as possible i love the phrase protected enclave i think that summarizes it quite nicely
I think so, too. He was basically discussing sort of that very secure environment as the starting point for when you can actually get access to this data. But again, it goes back to the conversation of like, does everyone actually need to be within that enclave? His example felt very, very poignant of when an inside actor can take your whole organization down.
I would agree with you on that. It's quite a thoughtful point, isn't it? So the final thing I wanted to ask Nigel was how, well, confidential computing is intending to be developed alongside emerging forms of post quantum cryptography. I mean, to some extent, they sort of contradict each other.
The fundamental encryption algorithm that's used in confidential computing is AES. So AES-256 is actually the standard algorithm that the American National Institute of Standards and Technology are advising and recommending for security against the quantum computer. Today they are using algorithms which are thought to be vulnerable to a quantum computer, ECDSA, RSA.
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