Confidential Computing is an emerging area for protecting sensitive data while processing it simultaneously. It consists of hardware and software components. The hardware component is part of a special CPU that supports Confidential Computing- for example, Intel SGX. Conclave SDK is a software component of Confidential Computing that lets engineers interact with hardware and run business logic using Java or JavaScript. In this quick How-To Guide, you will learn how to get started with Conclave SDK. Conclave SDK supports a simulation/mock mode, which means you don’t need special-purpose hardware to write Conclave apps.
- Understand Confidential Computing using the white paper here. From this document, you should be able to gain an understanding of some key fundamentals: data can be in transit, at rest, or in use. Confidential Computing protects data while in use. There are three main parts of Confidential Computing: enclave — the part of the CPU that processes data, untampered by anyone. Even the processor on which the enclave is running has no access to the data. The second part is a host, which is the processor that the enclave is running on. And the third part is a client — the outside process that requests services from Confidential Computing. The client passes its encrypted private data to the host, which passes it to the enclave. The host is always playing a middleman role between client and enclave.
- Understand the fundamentals of Conclave using the information provided in this blog or in the recorded BootCamp. Conclave SDK makes it very easy to interact with low-level enclave libraries, and you can write your code in Java or JavaScript. Only Conclave has genuine remote attestation, which is a way for the enclave to prove to the client that it is running expected business logic and no-one has seen clients’ data.
- Download ConclaveSDK here.
- Load from your favorite IDE ‘Hello World’ app which lives here: conclave-sdk-1.1/hello-world. Let’s take it as the foundation of our app. First, check that all parts are installed correctly by building the project with gradle: choose to run on mock hardware if you run on a normal computer. ./gradlew host:assemble -PenclaveMode=mock , for debug/release modes please read here
- Run the host:
../scripts/container-gradle host:run - When you see this line:
‘Listening on port 9999’you can start the client session - On a different terminal tab, start the client:
./gradlew client:run — args=”Reverse me”. The result on the client’s side: Enclave reversed‘Reverse me’and gave us the answer’em esreveR’.
Congratulations, you have run your first Conclave app!
Visit our Conclave page to learn more about Conclave.
Visit the Conclave Docs for more reference materials.
