A Behavioral Approach to Security: Analyzing the behavior of suspicious code

Gobikrishna Dhanuskodi, Sudeshna Guha, Vidhya Krishnan, Aruna Manjunatha, Michael O'Connor, Rob Nertney, Phil Rogers - Creating the First Confidential GPUs
Today's datacenter GPU has a long and storied 3D graphics heritage. In the 1990s, graphics chips for PCs and consoles had fixed pipelines for geometry, rasterization, and pixels using integer and fixed-point arithmetic. In 1999, NVIDIA invented the modern GPU, which put a set of programmable cores at the heart of the chip, enabling rich 3D scene generation with great efficiency.

Antoine Delignat-Lavaud, Cédric Fournet, Kapil Vaswani, Sylvan Clebsch, Maik Riechert, Manuel Costa, Mark Russinovich - Why Should I Trust Your Code?
For Confidential Computing to become ubiquitous in the cloud, in the same way that HTTPS became the default for networking, a different, more flexible approach is needed. Although there is no guarantee that every malicious code behavior will be caught upfront, precise auditability can be guaranteed: Anyone who suspects that trust has been broken by a confidential service should be able to audit any part of its attested code base, including all updates, dependencies, policies, and tools. To achieve this, we propose an architecture to track code provenance and to hold code providers accountable. At its core, a new Code Transparency Service (CTS) maintains a public, append-only ledger that records all code deployed for confidential services.

David Kaplan - Hardware VM Isolation in the Cloud
Confidential computing is a security model that fits well with the public cloud. It enables customers to rent VMs while enjoying hardware-based isolation that ensures that a cloud provider cannot purposefully or accidentally see or corrupt their data. SEV-SNP was the first commercially available x86 technology to offer VM isolation for the cloud and is deployed in Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. As confidential computing technologies such as SEV-SNP develop, confidential computing is likely to simply become the default trust model for the cloud.

Mark Russinovich - Confidential Computing: Elevating Cloud Security and Privacy
Confidential Computing (CC) fundamentally improves our security posture by drastically reducing the attack surface of systems. While traditional systems encrypt data at rest and in transit, CC extends this protection to data in use. It provides a novel, clearly defined security boundary, isolating sensitive data within trusted execution environments during computation. This means services can be designed that segment data based on least-privilege access principles, while all other code in the system sees only encrypted data. Crucially, the isolation is rooted in novel hardware primitives, effectively rendering even the cloud-hosting infrastructure and its administrators incapable of accessing the data.