State of Confidential Computing by Dr. Kapil Vaswani

Venue: Bharti501

Abstract: Over the last decade, confidential computing has emerged as an advanced security and privacy primitive that can fundamentally change the nature of trust that we place in digital services. In this talk, we will take a journey through the evolution of confidential computing and understand its current state and open problems that will need to be solved. Towards the end, I will introduce SPARC, a new research center working at the intersection of AI and security, and our view of the opportunities that confidential computing creates for building the next generation of AI systems.

Bio: Kapil Vaswani is the founder of SPARC. He is a security researcher with 18 years of experience in research spanning computer architecture, programming languages, systems, hardware security, and AI security. At Microsoft Research, he led research on problems in confidential computing, privacy-preserving AI, database security, supply chain security, and formally verified hardware. His research has been published in many top tier conferences such as POPL, PLDI, ASPLOS, MICRO, OSDI, Oakland and USENIX Security. His work directly led to several products at Microsoft including SQL Server Always Encrypted, Azure Confidential GPU VMs, Azure AI Confidential Inferencing, Azure Confidential Clean Rooms, and Ad Selection API.  In his capacity as a volunteer with iSPIRT, he has led the development of the DEPA Inferencing and Training Framework. ​Kapil Vaswani has a master’s and PhD from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.