New Approaches to Data Protection in the Cloud

Despite the flexibility and convenience of cloud services, data privacy during processing on untrusted resources, which cloud servers are, has hindered wider adoption. While technologies like network traffic and disk encryption ensure the protection of data-at-rest and data-in-transit, safeguarding data-in-use remained a challenge. Cryptographic methods like homomorphic encryption offer protection but are significantly slower and more resource-intensive than unprotected data processing. Recent advancements in processor capabilities allow for isolating and encrypting the entire memory of a virtual machine running on a server, leading to the emergence of trusted execution environments (TEEs) and confidential computing. These techniques ensure data protection during processing on untrusted resources. This paper provides an overview of current confidential computing concepts, mechanisms for ensuring trust in remote computations, and recently discovered threats.