Enclaves in the clouds
Jatinder Pal Singh, Jennifer Cobbe, Do Le Quoc, Zahra Tarkhani · Communications of the ACM · 2021
Trusted Execution Environments ('TEEs') or 'secure enclaves' aim at enabling more secure computation and data management. There is much enthusiasm for this technology, not least as we see increasing legal and regulatory attention on issues of security, privacy, and data management and use. With cloud providing the infrastructure for underpinning applications, data processing and analytics/ML, access to enclaves and enclave-backed technologies are increasingly being offered by service (cloud) providers - with the technology described as enabling confidential computing . This paper provides a high-level overview of the common security properties provided by enclaves, and considers how such technology, in being offered by cloud providers, relates to organizational legal and regulatory concerns. Focusing on data protection regulations, we explore the aspects of TEEs that might assist compliance, and who stands to benefit from the deployment of such technology in a service provision context.