The presentation will be titled “Security Analysis of Confidential Computing and Anonymous Communication”
Confidential Computing extends security guarantees to the data processing stage, providing confidentiality and integrity during execution through Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) anchored in specialized hardware.
Anonymous Communication, in turn, protects the identity of the parties and the metadata associated with interactions—information that remains exposed even when the content is protected by encryption. This presentation discusses the technical foundations of both paradigms and their security properties under a realistic threat model, demonstrating that their guarantees are conditional and depend on a chain of trust based on hardware, remote attestation, and proper separation of responsibilities among components.
As a case study, we analyze Meta’s Private Processing for WhatsApp, which combines TEEs, Oblivious HTTP, and immutable logs to enable AI features while preserving user privacy, illustrating the complementarity between Confidential Computing, Anonymous Communication, and End-to-End Encryption (E2EE).
The speaker
Professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). Member of the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC). He holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (2002), a master’s degree in Computer Science (2010), and a Ph.D. (2015) from the same university. He completed a sandwich PhD program (2011–2012) at Cisco Systems (USA). He completed postdoctoral research at the Federal University of Pará (2016). Experienced in the field of Computer Networks and Distributed Systems, with an emphasis on Computer Network Management and Security.