"Intel Announces Confidential Computing-as-a-Service' Project Amber'"

Intel's recently announced "Project Amber" is a new service aimed at unifying and authenticating confidential computing across single, multi-, and hybrid-cloud environments. The idea behind confidential computing is to protect data while it is being used, not just while it is being stored or transferred. Intel's SGE processors encrypt data in memory and compute it in a secure enclave, but currently, authenticating programs to see data does not transfer well across environments. In addition, there is nothing in place to ensure a third-party system is providing the confidential computing service it promises. According to Intel, its new service for confidential computing will provide attestation- and assurance-as-a-service. Nikhil Deshpande, director of product development at Intel, says Project Amber will decouple the attestation from the infrastructure, and end-users will be able to get consistent and uniform attestation for all their workloads. Project Amber will be a cloud-native, containerized, microservice architecture that runs on Kubernetes, with plug-ins for various Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). The service's customer will be the end-user, not the CSP, but the end-users will still be able to use the CSPs' native integration of SGE's confidential computing capabilities. However, Intel predicts that customers in complex environments, whose only other option for an authentication service would be to code their own attestation platform, will move to their offered option. This article continues to discuss Intel's new confidential computing-as-a-service, Project Amber.

SC Media reports "Intel Announces Confidential Computing-as-a-Service' Project Amber'"