Arm chips for mobile and IoT devices have supported secure enclaves — a concept known as confidential computing — for years. It’s called the Arm TrustZone trusted execution environment, and it’s been available for mobile devices since 2004 and in its M-Class IoT since 2014. The chip designer is now bringing confidential computing to its data center-class chip designs.
The Armv9 architecture, launched in March, features Arm CCA (Confidential Compute Architecture).
Since Arm, based in Cambridge, UK, licenses its designs out to various chipmakers, the release will help democratize confidential computing in data centers, Mark Knight, director of architecture products at Arm, said. Server-chip giants Intel, AMD, and IBM each have their own secure enclave technology for data centers.
Arm CCA builds on the original Arm TrustZone technology, Knight told DCK, to extend the principle of a hardware-based secure processing environment to a wider range of workloads.
“Arm CCA takes the kind of high-trust secure enclaves that have previously been accessible to only device manufacturers and operating system vendors and opens secure computing to all developers and all data center workloads,” he said.
