Working Group
Confidential Computing
This group aims to represent a radically more secure way to isolate and attest computing workloads through confidential computing.
The industry has strived for many years to protect data and avoid unauthorized access through many layers of controls that also manifest in regulations today. Through the use of modern Confidential Computing-enabled processors and services, sensitive workloads can be protected while resident in memory and in use, attack surfaces are dramatically reduced, and controls minimized. In addition, Confidential Computing delivers hardware-based roots of trust to enable digitally signed guarantees of trust and application identity to be established.
What do we discuss?
Confidential computing digitally guarantees code integrity, so the code that is built has assured integrity to be the code that executes. With very strong trust, new ways of computing are also possible, including multi-party computation between untrusted parties, and potentially simpler compliance controls.
Working Group Co-Chairs
Mark Novak
Mark has been involved in Confidential Computing since mid-2000’s – longer than the term itself has been in existence. Mark moonlights as the chair of the Confidential Computing Consortium’s Governance, Risk and Compliance SIG. His day job involves practicing enterprise security architecture for a multinational financial institution. In his previous job Mark was the architect for some of Microsoft’s Azure services and before that – worked a...
Alec Fernandez
Principal Program Manager at Microsoft
Alec spent several decades working with SAS Institute, a pioneering data analytics software company as a security architect. He worked to develop a framework for encrypting all network traffic.
Currently Alec works as a program manage at Microsoft where he helps drive features to improve the security posture of Confidential Computing products that prevent unauthorized individuals, including Microsoft operators, from being able to a...
Mark Bower
VP, Product Management at Anjuna
Mark Bower has two decades of experience at leading security companies in the U.S., Australia, U.K., and Germany. He is a noted expert in data protection, data privacy, and information risk reduction. Before joining Anjuna, where he owns product strategy for advanced confidential computing, he headed product and business strategy for Comforte AG, Voltage Security (acquired by HPE) and the Atalla HSM business at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. ...
| Publications in Review | Open Until |
|---|---|
| Standards-Benchmarks-Maturity | Dec 13, 2025 |
| Open Source Red Teaming Tool: PyRIT Automation Capability in Agentic Red Team Testing Environments | Dec 13, 2025 |
| Using Zero Trust Against Identity Spoofing and Abuse | Dec 20, 2025 |
| Using Zero Trust to Secure Enterprise Information in LLM Environments | Dec 20, 2025 |
Who can join?
Anyone can join a working group, whether you have years of experience or want to just participate as a fly on the wall.
What is the time commitment?
The time commitment for this group varies depending on the project. You can spend a 15 minutes helping review a publication that's nearly finished or help author a publication from start to finish.
Open Peer Reviews
Peer reviews allow security professionals from around the world to provide feedback on CSA research before it is published.