In conjunction with the 2023 Confidential Computing Summit last week, VMware announced a partnership with tech giants to accelerate the development of confidential computing applications.
Confidential computing relies on a trusted execution environment that ensures the integrity and confidentiality of applications and data, even in the cloud and on third-party infrastructure.
With the emergence of multi-cloud deployments and machine learning, confidential computing is expected to help protect intellectual property and sensitive data, but its adoption lags due to difficulties in creating applications for it.
To help overcome obstacles in implementing confidential computing, VMware has been working on a developer-focused Certifier Framework for Confidential Computing project that now has support from AMD, Samsung, and members of the RISC-V Keystone community.
In a push for the adoption of confidential computing, the open source Certifier Framework provides a standardized, platform-agnostic API for building and operating confidential computing applications, which is paired with a policy evaluation server, the Certifier Service.
“The Certifier API greatly simplifies and unifies programming and operations support for multi-vendor Confidential Computing platforms by providing simple client trust management, including attestation evaluation, secure storage, platform initialization, secret sharing, secure channels and other services,” VMware explains.
The accompanying Certifier Service supports trust management, including attestation evaluation, application upgrade, and other related services.
By offering support for defining and implementing trust policies, the Certifier Framework aims to simplify the development of privacy-focused applications, secure cloud workloads, and secret-preserving services.
VMware is inviting the community to review and contribute to the open source Certifier Framework, to standardize the platform-independent APIs and to drive the development of confidential computing code for x86, Arm, and RISC-V ecosystems.
“Confidential Computing has the potential to secure workloads no matter where they run including in multi-cloud and edge settings. The challenge has been to help customers adopt and implement the standard with ease,” VMware CTO Kit Colbert said.
Related: Intel Adds TDX to Confidential Computing Portfolio With Launch of 4th Gen Xeon Processors
