Steve Orrin, federal chief technology officer at Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), said government agencies should adopt data encryption capabilities to protect classified information from breaches and one of the encryption innovations they can use now is confidential computing.
“Confidential computing works by having the CPU reserve a section of memory as a secure enclave, encrypting the memory in the enclave with a key unique to the CPU,” Orrin wrote in an article published Monday on FedTech Magazine.
“Data and application code placed in the enclave can be decrypted only within that enclave, on that CPU. Even if attackers gained root access to the system, they wouldn’t be able to read the data,” he added.
Orrin discussed how confidential computing could enable agencies to protect data in the cloud while in use and meet government compliance and security requirements.
He noted that industry is advancing the development of new encryption capabilities like homomorphic encryption and cryptographic algorithms to keep pace with sophisticated cyberattacks and the emergence of quantum computers.
