Canonical, the developer of the Ubuntu operating system, has announced the availability of Ubuntu Confidential Virtual Machines (CVMs) on Microsoft Azure. Currently, Ubuntu 20.04 is the first and only Linux distribution to support CVM on Azure, but this may change in the future.
The new Ubuntu CVMs take advantage of Secure Encrypted Virtualization – Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP), which is supported on 3rd generation AMD CPUs. Until then, vulnerable code in the operating system, hypervisor, or firmware could put data at risk, and a malicious cloud administrator with elevated privileges could also pose a threat. With CVM, the workload is isolated, only the hardware CPU needs to be trusted, and malicious administrators cannot access the data.
If you want to learn more about setting up CVM, Microsoft has a detailed guide explaining the process:
As mentioned earlier, Ubuntu 20.04 is currently the only Linux distribution that supports CVM.
Canonical made it clear that its CVM on Azure is just the first step in delivering Ubuntu’s confidential computing power on the public cloud:
Presumably, it will also release Ubuntu 22.04 CVM for Azure in the future, but it doesn’t say if or when that will happen.
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