Detailed text description: Regular service compared to a confidential service
This page provides a long description of the diagram used in the What is confidential compute article. It compares what you have to trust when you run a regular service and when you run a confidential service.
Overview
The diagram has two parts side by side. Background colors mark trust. Green areas are trusted. Red areas with a dashed border are untrusted.
Regular service
- Trusted infrastructure:
- Shown as a green area.
- Includes the hosts, the hypervisor, the platform and the operators.
- Your service:
- Runs directly inside the trusted infrastructure.
- Its protection depends on trusting everything around it.
Confidential service
- Untrusted infrastructure:
- Shown as a red area with a dashed border.
- Includes the hosts, the hypervisor, the platform and the operators.
- Confidential sandbox:
- Shown as a green area inside the untrusted infrastructure.
- Is a trusted execution environment (TEE) provided by the CPU.
- Your service:
- Runs inside the confidential sandbox.
- Is protected from the untrusted infrastructure around it.