Digital Sovereignty is commonly interpreted as a legal concept - but can it be turned into a technical guarantee? We introduce a new sovereignty boundary within existing public cloud infrastructure built on (and generalizing) the concept of confidential computing, where a given workload is totally isolated from its surrounding shared infrastructure within a trusted execution environment (TEE), enforced and attested in hardware. Although the concept of TEEs applies to a unit of computation (e.g., a process, VM, or container), we propose to extend these security guarantees to an entire cloud tenant, i.e., a cloud account with all its resources – IaaS (i.e., VMs), PaaS (e.g., Kubernetes clusters), and SaaS (e.g., model-as-a-service endpoints) and its associated management layer, including its own identity, access control and key management services. Critically, we introduce virtual data diode (VDD), a novel primitive that allows confidential tenants to control all movements of data within and without their confidential tenancy, including traffic to shared infrastructure services. We also introduce new operator controls to ensure that support requests can be addressed when operators need access to logs or must perform manual maintenance actions on the tenant’s resources, while ensuring that all maintenance actions can be reviewed and approved by the confidential tenant.
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