November 5th: IBM announced its IBM Cloud Data Shield technology allowing companies to deploy decentralized cloud solutions with a state-of-the-art level of security. iExec is proud to work in collaboration with the deployment of this technology, being one of the first uses for the IBM Cloud Data Shield.

What is IBM Data Shield?

Data Shield, powered by Fortanix, provides ‘data-in-use’ protection for your container workloads running on the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. It leverages Intel® Software Guard Extensions (SGX) technology to run code and data in CPU-hardened “enclaves” or a ‘Trusted Execution Environment’ (TEE). The enclave is a trusted area of memory where critical aspects of the application functionality are protected, helping keep code and data confidential and unmodified.

“iExec was an excellent partner to work with and they were instrumental in providing inputs that drove capabilities like secrets provisioning and attestation in the IBM Cloud Data Shield product. The iExec platform leverages SGX technology to deliver secure provisioning of secrets for DApps ensuring the complete protection of Data and application execution environment.” — Karna Bojjireddy, Program Director, IBM Cloud Security.

iExec and IBM Cloud Data Shield

iExec recently released its End-To-End Trusted Compute solution to maximize zero trust decentralized architectures. This solution is based on Intel SGX technology and allows developers to ensure the end-to-end protection of user input and output data as well as embedded application data when executing applications on distributed and decentralized networks. The IBM Cloud Data Shield, offering a simple interface to convert legacy docker application to Intel® SGX enabled docker applications, is one of the core SGX frameworks integrated into iExec’s End-to-end trusted compute solution.

“We are very pleased to collaborate with IBM — utilizing IBM’s Data Shield to protect Blockchain-based DApps executing in iExec decentralized cloud. IBM Data Shield delivers secure provisioning of secrets for Dapps, ensuring the data and application execution remain completely protected.” Gilles Fedak, CEO of iExec.

Conclusion

Working alongside a state-of-the-art project such as IBM has always been part of the plan for iExec. Launching Trusted Compute solutions utilizing Intel® SGX and now IBM Cloud Data Shield underlines iExec’s place as leaders of the TEE trend. The integration of these types of technologies and bringing true ‘Zero Trust’ architectures to life, is revolutionary for blockchain developers and the decentralized movement.