This term identifies those techniques and technologies that allow data protection during their use. A step forward in information security that takes into account the development of the sector and emerging needs.
Applications that use artificial intelligence and the large amount of sensitive data processed, especially in sectors such as healthcare or finance, have made the need for effective protection of data as it is processed increasingly urgent. That's what confidential computing is all about. It is in particular the data that are found in RAM, the memory of a system, and which are processed in some way. Indeed, while encryption already offers good protection for data stored or transmitted over the network, the problem of security arises today for this particular phase of data processing.
The protection of the data in use is carried out by the Confidential Computing Consortium, which processes the data in protected environments, keeping them safe. The latter is made up of Microsoft, Google, Red Hat, Intel, Huawei, Facebook, Accenture, ARM, and Ant Group. This attention has grown in recent years, both as a result of the regulations in the field of cyber security which make the person who processes the data responsible for their safety and due to the growth of attacks aimed precisely at the data being processed, called attacks side channel.
Side-channel attacks, what they are and how they work.
A side channel attack aims to obtain information from a device aimed at violating it at a later time, addressing more than anything else its operation, the collection of data just as they are being processed. The term side channel dates back to the 1990s, when a researcher discovered the possibility of carrying out attacks by keeping the energy consumption of a machine under control. Indeed, or this type of attack the cyber criminal exploits not so much the vulnerabilities of the software as the behavior of the machine itself. The same sounds of the CPU can lead to understanding the operation of a device.
Other types of side channel attacks exploit access to the system cache, or infrared images to monitor the CPU and collect information, or even the electromagnetic fields of the processed data.
This type of attack, although known for a long time, has so far remained in the background given the need for proximity to the machine. However, the technological evolution that sees devices capable of recording audio and video continuously could lead to an increase in these threats.
