Cloud Native Confidential: Isolating Kubernetes Pods with Confidential Computing

Confidential Computing expands the cloud threat model into a drastically different paradigm, where cloud providers no longer need to be trusted.

The Confidential Containers project integrates this security promise by allowing any Kubernetes pod to run into its own trusted execution environment.

This presentation will first describe the project architecture. We will show how it's reusing the Kata Containers software stack to build confidential micro-VMs for Kubernetes pods to run into. We will explain how those VMs transparently leverage the latest Confidential Computing hardware implementations from Intel, AMD or IBM.

Then we will go through several key components of the project software stack like e.g. the Attestation Agent or the container image management Rust crates. We will show how they form a software architecture that verifies, attests and runs encrypted workloads on top of encrypted memory only.

Finally we will look at the project roadmap and future.