Confidential Computing on Realms on Edge devices

The next step after providing a single image that contains all the software stack needed to easily and properly run Realms on Arm platforms is to investigate how Realms can be used in edge devices.

As of today, circa June 2023, when this project has been created, confidential computing is mainly a data center topic. Only the most expensive and advanced processors have support for this technology on other processor architectures and, even though we still don’t have a real Arm platform that implemented the RME, the initial target for this technology is the server market.

That said, it is important to notice that the only reason why this is not a hot topic for smaller devices today that usually run on the edge is because this technology is still not in the roadmap of the processor vendors targeting the edge market.

The objective of this Epic is to explore what would be interesting use cases for confidential computing in Edge devices before this become a hard requirement from the market.