Research at CDCC lays the foundations for distributed confidential computing (DCC), regardless of specific TEE hardware, and also develops innovative DCC technologies that enable transformative applications. The DCC foundation includes the following four building blocks:
Assurance of TEE Code
The code thrust leads to an open ecosystem for TEE code certification, not relying on any trusted party but on a trustworthy application store whose certification operations are public, accountable and verifiable
Assurance of TEE Computing Nodes
The node thrust aims to develop dynamic data-use policy models and enforcement mechanisms for trust management and frameworks for scalable runtime data control on the TEE nodes executing certified code.
Assurance of TEE Workflows
The workflow thrust focuses on ensuring that the whole distributed computational workflow built on TEE nodes is compliant with data-use policies.
Assurance for DCC Stakeholders
The stakeholder thrust studies the stakeholder’s preference and expectations to guide the design of DCC technologies and ensure their usability.
On top of these building blocks, we study various transformative applications to be enabled. Examples include confidential disease prognosis, data-in-use protection for self-driving, confidential collaborative anti-money laundering and drug development.