Confidential Computing
Keeping Data Private While It’s Being Used
About
Protecting sensitive data is a huge challenge, especially when organisations need to process that data without exposing it to outsiders. Many privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) exist to solve this problem, but they can be difficult to set up and understand. Some require complex decision-making around security risks, privacy trade-offs, and technical configurations.
But what if there was a way to get strong privacy protection without needing a deep technical background?
That’s exactly what confidential computing provides—a powerful and easy-to-use solution for protecting sensitive data during processing.
How Does Confidential Computing Work?
At the heart of confidential computing are Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) — also known as secure enclaves. These are special hardware-protected areas within a computer or cloud server that keep data safe while it is being processed.
You can think of a TEE as a secure, locked room where sensitive data can be analyzed. Once inside, no one — not hackers, cloud providers, or even the organisation running the computation — can see what’s happening. The TEE only outputs the final results, ensuring that the data stays private at all times.
This works similarly to encryption, which protects data when it’s being stored or sent over the internet. But TEEs go a step further by also keeping the data safe while it's actively being used in a computation.
What Guarantees Does Confidential Computing Provide?
Confidential computing offers three key protections:
Data Confidentiality– Sensitive information remains hidden from unauthorized users while inside a TEE.Data Integrity– No one can alter or tamper with the data once it's inside the secure enclave.Code Integrity– The instructions for processing the data are locked in place, ensuring that the software inside the TEE cannot be changed or manipulated.
By combining these guarantees, confidential computing provides a scalable, trustworthy way to process sensitive data securely — without requiring organizations to reconfigure their entire data infrastructure.
Why Does This Matter?
Unlike other privacy solutions, confidential computing is easier to adopt because:
It works
without requiring major technical expertise.It
protects both the data and the codethat processes it.It can be used
for a variety of applications, from securingfinancial transactionstoprivacy-preserving machine learning.
However, there are some limitations:
TEE technology is tied to physical hardware and firmware, meaning improvements happen more slowly than advancements in cloud computing or AI.Trust is placed in the hardware manufacturerswho build the TEEs, as they provide the security guarantees.
Despite these challenges, confidential computing is one of the most effective ways to ensure data privacy. It can even be combined with other PETs — such as secure machine learning or differential privacy — to create even stronger security solutions.