Abstract

In the pre-cloud era, computer systems were operated directly by the organizations which depended upon them. This approach, that later became known as on-premises, gave organizations great power over their systems, for instance, the ability to control who had access to their data. However, “with great power comes great responsibility” and organizations were left with the ongoing burden of deploying and managing their own systems. Then along came cloud computing, which promised to free organizations of this burden and the mass migration to the cloud began. Cloud computing today has removed much of the responsibility of deploying systems, however, it has also removed much of the power that organizations once had. Organizations must place their trust in the cloud to maintain the confidentiality of their data and the integrity of their code.

In this talk, I will consider whether it is possible to regain control over systems in the cloud (all of the power with none of the responsibility) and even enable multiple untrusted parties to compute together in the cloud. Do not fear, this is not a web3 or cryptocurrency talk 😛. Instead, we will look at TEEs (Trusted Execution Environments) and the emerging ecosystem of software around them. I will introduce CCF (Confidential Consortium Framework), an open-source framework for building a new category of secure, highly available, and confidential applications that focus on multi-party compute in the cloud. By the end of the talk, I hope to have convinced you that distributing systems does not necessarily mean distributing trust in the era of trusted execution in the cloud.