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Confidential Computing Consortium

The Linux Foundation’s home for software that protects data while it is being processed, inside hardware trusted execution environments: 14 projects such as Gramine, Open Enclave SDK and Veraison, at incubation, graduation or emeritus.

1 projects in this catalogPart of the Linux Foundation1 graduationWebsite

What it is

The Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC) is part of the non-profit Linux Foundation. It formalised its structure on October 17, 2019, with Alibaba, Arm, Google Cloud, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft and Red Hat as premier members and Baidu, ByteDance, Fortanix, Swisscom, Tencent, VMware and others as general members. Its subject is “data in use”: disk and network encryption protect data at rest and in transit, and confidential computing protects it while a program works on it, by running the program in a hardware trusted execution environment (TEE) such as an Intel SGX enclave or an AMD SEV-SNP or Intel TDX virtual machine, and proving with attestation what is running there. Member dues pay for a Governing Board, a Technical Advisory Council (TAC), an Outreach Committee and special interest groups on attestation, the Linux kernel, workload identity and regulation.

The members are chip makers, clouds and security start-ups. Premier membership costs $60,000 a year and brings a voting seat on both the board and the TAC; general membership costs $5,000 to $30,000 depending on headcount. In October 2026 the CCC’s landscape listed 65 members: 11 premier (AMD, Alpha Compute, Google, Huawei, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Shielded Technologies, TikTok and Volcano Engine), 32 general, among them Arm, Canonical, Cisco, JPMorgan Chase, Red Hat and SUSE, 15 start-ups and 7 associates. AWS was not among them.

For someone choosing technology, the badge is narrower than the field. The CCC hosts 14 projects: libraries, SDKs and firmware that sit between TEE hardware and your application, such as Gramine for running unmodified Linux programs in SGX enclaves, Open Enclave SDK for writing enclave applications, Veraison for verifying attestation evidence and COCONUT-SVSM for confidential VMs. It does not cover the cloud services built on the same hardware, or Confidential Containers, which is a CNCF project. Only three projects have reached graduation, the stage that requires production use by two independent organisations; the CCC’s own policy says incubation sets no requirements for community size, governance or production readiness.

Its projects in this catalog

Graduation1

Projects used in production by at least two independent end-user organisations, with a steady flow of contributions and a growth plan, admitted by a two-thirds TAC vote.

GramineOpen sourceA library OS that runs unmodified Linux applications, including multi-process ones, inside Intel SGX enclaves, with a manifest that pins every trusted file and built-in remote attestation.

In depth

Projects in October 2026#

The CCC’s governance repository lists each project’s stage and the date its Governing Board accepted it.

ProjectStageWhat it doesAccepted
GramineGraduationA library OS that runs unmodified Linux applications inside Intel SGX enclavesSeptember 2021
Open Enclave SDKGraduationAn SDK for building TEE applications against one enclave abstractionOctober 2019
VeraisonGraduationComponents for building an attestation verification serviceMay 2022
Certifier FrameworkIncubationA client API and policy service that unify trust management across TEE platformsJanuary 2024
COCONUT-SVSMIncubationA Secure VM Service Module that runs inside a confidential VM and shields it from the hypervisorApril 2024
DstackIncubationAn SDK for deploying docker-compose applications into TEEs, with secret management and a TLS proxyOctober 2025
EnarxIncubationA WebAssembly runtime that runs applications in a TEE without rewritesOctober 2019
IsletIncubationRust software for confidential computing on Armv9 CCA devicesMarch 2024
ManaTEEIncubationA framework for data collaboration on private datasets in cloud TEEsAugust 2024
spdm-rsIncubationA Rust implementation of SPDM, IDE_KM and TDISP for assigning devices to TEEsJanuary 2024
VirTEEIncubationTools for bringing up, attesting and managing TEEsJanuary 2024
KeystoneEmeritusTEEs for RISC-V hardware; archived in July 2026March 2021
OcclumEmeritusA library OS for running unmodified programs in SGX enclaves; archived in July 2026September 2021
VeracruzEmeritusA research project on privacy-preserving multi-party computation; archived in May 2025April 2021

How a project gets in and moves up#

Joining takes three steps. The project presents a proposal, following the CCC’s submission template, at a TAC meeting, with one TAC representative as its sponsor; the TAC can ask for changes such as a governance document or a code of conduct, and accepts it by a majority vote and decides its starting stage. The project then goes through legal onboarding with LF Projects, LLC, which drafts a technical charter; the CCC requires trademarks to be transferred to, or available for use by, LF Projects. Finally the Governing Board votes on the proposal and charter.

Moving to graduation needs a two-thirds supermajority of the TAC and evidence: production use by at least two independent end-user organisations, a substantial ongoing flow of commits, enough community participation to meet the project’s growth plan, and work towards a diverse community. The TAC reviews every project each year, including its licence scans and its OpenSSF Best Practices badge, and can move a graduated project back to incubation if progress stalls. A move to emeritus needs a notice in the project’s README for a month and a vote of two-thirds of all TAC representatives, after which the project archives its repositories.

What a project gets in return is modest: a TAC liaison, up to $7,500 a year for test hardware and software, a funded mentee through the CCC mentorship programme, mailing lists, a video-conferencing account, a domain and access to the Linux Foundation’s LFX tools.

Where it came from2017–2026

Hardware for running code that its own host cannot read reached the cloud in the mid-2010s: Microsoft announced Azure confidential computing on Intel SGX in September 2017, and Google followed with Confidential VMs on AMD SEV in July 2020. Each vendor had its own SDK, and the Linux Foundation brought them together. Plans for the consortium were first revealed at Open Source Summit in San Diego in 2019, and on October 17 it formalised its membership and governance. Three projects came with it: Intel’s SGX SDK, Microsoft’s Open Enclave SDK and Red Hat’s Enarx.

The TAC wrote a project progression policy that December and took in more projects over the next two years: Graphene, a library OS from Stony Brook University and Intel Labs that renamed itself Gramine when it joined, Keystone, Occlum and Veracruz. Veraison followed in 2022. In 2023 the TAC cut its maturity levels from four to three, so the old sandbox became incubation and the old incubation became graduation, and Gramine and Open Enclave SDK were listed at graduation that December.

Since 2024 the intake has moved from enclave SDKs towards confidential VMs, devices and attestation, with VirTEE, spdm-rs, the Certifier Framework, Islet, COCONUT-SVSM, ManaTEE and Dstack joining. At the same time older SGX-era projects were retired: Veracruz became emeritus in May 2025, and Keystone and Occlum were archived in July 2026.

Why it’s built this way

Standardise around data in use, not one chip
The founding members included competing chip designers (Intel, Arm, Huawei) and competing clouds (Alibaba, Google, Microsoft), so the consortium framed its work as protecting data in use on any TEE rather than promoting one vendor’s hardware.
A low bar to enter, a higher one to graduate
Incubation needs only a TAC sponsor and a presentation, so early and research projects can find a neutral home; graduation asks for production users at two independent organisations and a two-thirds vote.
Every project goes to LF Projects
Even projects without trademarks are submitted to LF Projects, LLC, with their own technical charter, so names and governance sit with a neutral owner rather than the company that started them.

Timeline

  1. 2017

    Microsoft announces Azure confidential computing on Intel SGX in September

  2. 2019

    Consortium formalised on October 17 with Intel SGX SDK, Open Enclave SDK and Enarx; progression policy written in December

  3. 2021

    Governing Board accepts Keystone, Veracruz, Gramine and Occlum

  4. 2022

    Veraison accepted in May

  5. 2023

    Stages cut from four to three; Gramine and Open Enclave SDK listed at graduation in December

  6. 2024

    VirTEE, spdm-rs, Certifier Framework, Islet, COCONUT-SVSM and ManaTEE join

  7. 2025

    Veracruz moves to emeritus in May; Dstack accepted in October

  8. 2026

    Keystone and Occlum archived in July

Sources · facts checked 2026-10-28

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