Angelo Ruocco, Chris Porter, Claudio Carvalho, Daniele Buono, Derren Dunn, Hubertus Franke, James Bottomley, Marcio Silva, Mengmei Ye, Niteesh Dubey, Tobin Feldman-Fitzthum (IBM Research)

Developers leverage machine learning (ML) platforms to handle a range of their ML tasks in the cloud, but these use cases have not been deeply considered in the context of confidential computing. Confidential computing’s threat model treats the cloud provider as untrusted, so the user’s data in use (and certainly at rest) must be encrypted and integrity-protected. This host-guest barrier presents new challenges and opportunities in the ML platform space. In particular, we take a glancing look at ML platforms’ pipeline tools, how they currently align with the Confidential Containers project, and what may be needed to bridge several gaps.