Generative AI, Confidential Computing, and Post-Quantum Cryptography, Among Interesting Topics at Google Cloud NEXT

Thales and Google Cloud have worked together for years to develop cybersecurity solutions for Google Cloud and Google Workspace using sovereign controls to protect sensitive data.

Once again, this year, Thales participated in Google Cloud’s annual conference, Google Cloud NEXT. The conference hit on some hot topics including Generative AI, Confidential Computing, and Post-Quantum Cryptography. Thales excels in these rapidly advancing technologies that require privacy and data security and are eager to continue working with Google Cloud on them.

Generative AI

When it comes to Artificial Intelligence (AI), more than half of security experts revealed that they are concerned about data leakage and lack of control due to vulnerabilities when implementing AI, according to Gartner. (Source: Generative AI Security and Risk Management August 2023 IDG00799769)

At Google Cloud Next, organizations in financial, healthcare, and government verticals shared how they are using generative AI to enhance their productivity in many ways. The rapid increase of using AI is driving the need to ensure privacy and separation of duties of the stakeholders enabling solutions in these verticals.

With AI implementations, cybersecurity attacks can occur at different states of the AI pipeline including data collection, model creation and training, and at inference. Thales’ approach to mitigate these vulnerabilities and enable a secure framework around AI revolve around Confidential Computing.

Confidential Computing

The journey to the cloud can bring significant productivity and cost savings but also comes along with new demands for data sovereignty and safeguarding your data. Sensitive workloads can include personal identifiable information (PII) data, AI models, trade secrets, and/or intellectual property.

Thales brings its encryption expertise to the world of Confidential Computing and recently announced a collaboration with Intel to provide end-to-end data encryption. This solution has been battle tested on Google Cloud. By using Confidential Computing, you can help protect against malicious actors accessing code and data in use, in addition to data at rest and in transit. Encryption and key management help you bring sovereign control over your data and facilitate use cases that require multiple parties to collaborate on a computation without revealing their trade secrets and data to each other.

Confidential Computing is based on three pillars:

• Isolation, hardware- based silicon, abstracted from surrounding hypervisor, OS (Operating System), admins, and other cloud tenants.
• Protection, customer-controlled data security, access, and identity management, ensuring integrity of data in use.
• Verification, independent attestation of the hardware and software stack, to make sure of the authenticity and integrity of hardware, the datasets, and models during AI pipeline.

The Intel solution, in preview now, involves Google Cloud providing the isolation through Intel TDX technology, Thales providing data security via end-to-end data protection, and identity and access management, and Intel providing third party attestation.

Post-Quantum Cryptography

Thales is collaborating with industry partners to ensure crypto agility in anticipation of future cyber threats, including those posed by quantum computing. Quantum computers hold both exciting and alarming potential and pose a challenge to current cryptographic methods. The immense processing power of quantum computers could potentially break widely used encryption algorithms, which could compromise sensitive data., enabling malicious actors to launch advanced cyber-attacks.

To safeguard against these impending threats, Thales is partnering with Google Cloud on a technical validation project aimed at enhancing protections and ensuring crypto-agile solutions. Thales is developing an innovative integration with Google Workspace. This integration is designed to secure data exchanges between Google Workspace applications through External Key Management.

This initiative leverages Thales’ CipherTrust Cloud Key Management and Hold Your Own Key solution to defend against “harvest now, decrypt later” schemes anticipated with the advent of quantum computing.

Thales at Google Cloud NEXT

Thales recently joined other leading security specialists at Google Cloud NEXT ‘24 to speak on these important topics at four well-attended sessions. Click the session name below to see presentation materials and videos where available.

• Your Model, Your Data, Your Business with Nelly Porter, Director of Product Management, Google Cloud and Todd Moore, VP Data Protection, Thales
• Addressing Divers Regulation Requirements in Google Cloud with Matt Garr, Group Product Manager, Google Cloud and David Ortega, Principal Solutions Architect, Thales
• How Thales enables data sovereignty in Google Workspace with Todd Moore, VP Data Protection, Thales and Johney Burke, Product Manager, Google Cloud
• How Top Cybersecurity Companies Use Generative AI to Drive Change in the Industry with Ashvin Kamaraju, VP Global Engineering, Thales

Thales Earns Google Technology Award

At the event, Thales was recognized for its achievements in the Google Cloud ecosystem. For the second year in a row, Thales has received the 2024 Google Cloud Technology Partner of the Year Award for Security – Data Protection.