VMware partners with Samsung, AMD and RISC-V to accelerate confidential computing

VMware Inc. stepped up its efforts to accelerate the adoption of confidential computing today, announcing an alliance with chipmakers Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., as well as the RISC-V Keystone community.

Along with its new partners, VMware will work to promote an open-source project known as the “Certifier Framework for Confidential Computing,” which aims to overcome some of the biggest barriers to adopting confidential computing.

VMware is at the forefront of the development of confidential computing, which is a term that describes an encryption technology for data that’s being processed. Although strong encryption already exists for data that’s sitting idly in a server, or being transmitted across a network, there is nothing to protect that information as it’s being used. When an application needs to access data, the information must be decrypted into its original, readable form, which means it’s especially vulnerable to hackers while it’s being processed.

Confidential computing aims to change that. The idea is based on an emerging processor concept known as the “trusted execution environment,” which is able to maintain the confidentiality and integrity of data when it’s being deployed in cloud infrastructure or edge servers that might be operated by third parties.

With the Certifier Framework, VMware and the chipmakers aim to standardize on an easy-to-use, platform-independent application programming interface for building and running confidential computing applications. The Certifier Framework makes it much simpler for developers to create privacy-preserving applications, including machine learning and data economy workloads based on sensitive information aggregated from multiple sources. It provides platform-independent support for creating and enforcing the trust policies needed to secure workloads across third-party server infrastructure, including public cloud, sovereign cloud and edge environments, VMware said.

The partners envisage that their work on the Certifier Framework will eventually benefit the entire computing industry by enabling confidential computing on the x86, Arm and RISC-V processor architectures.

VMware said there are good reasons to want to accelerate confidential computing, as data encryption has become vital for multi-cloud deployments. There are many enterprise workloads that cannot be run in the cloud due to security concerns, VMware says. In addition, confidential computing can play a key role in protecting intellectual property and proprietary data that’s used in new applications around artificial intelligence and machine learning. Confidential computing is clearly desirable, said VMware’s chief technology officer Kit Colbert, but it will not become widely adopted unless it becomes easier for developers to build such applications.

“Confidential computing has the potential to secure workloads no matter where they run including in multicloud and edge settings,” he explained. “The challenge has been to help customers adopt and implement the standard with ease. The collective efforts of the growing ecosystem of contributors to Certifier Framework will help bring those benefits to bear to ISVs, enterprise customers and sovereign cloud providers, enabling them to use this emerging technology more easily and effectively.”

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that it’s encouraging to see VMWare taking the lead in promoting confidential computing, as it’s the industry leader in virtual machines, which power the vast majority of application workloads. “VMware is enlisting partners such as AMD, Samsung and the RISC-V players to secure virtualized workloads at the hardware level,” Mueller said. “This matters greatly to enterprises. As more workloads shift to the cloud, they need a better way to secure them and confidential computing does that, making it possible to run the right application on the right machine, safely and securely.”

VMware announced the new partnerships at the Confidential Computing Summit 2023 in San Francisco, where it also showcased a number of technology demonstrations involving confidential machine learning applications.

“Collaborating with industry partners, like VMware, is critical for accelerating adoption of confidential computing and securing workloads in the cloud,” said Raghu Nambiar, AMD’s corporate vice president of data center ecosystems and solutions. “No matter the size or technical sophistication of an organization, or where a workload is deployed, the Certifier Framework will help more customers realize the benefits of confidential computing.”

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