Towards A Secure Joint Cloud With Confidential Computing

Abstract

As data security in public clouds attracts more attention and concerns, researchers and practitioners have proposed techniques to secure cloud computing. Confidential computing (CC) is a compelling approach that guarantees both privacy and integrity of data and code in public clouds. In this paper, we first survey the status of CC in today’s commercialized public clouds, including the cloud CC abstractions, infrastructures, metrics, third-party service vendors, and real-world cloud use cases. We also discover the limitations such as re-programming efforts, extra cost, limited availability, etc. We further take a step forward to prospect CC in the joint cloud scenario. We finally showcase the challenges of realizing a secure joint cloud and propose possible solutions.