Hardening Your Stack: How Confidential Computing Supports End-to-End Trust

In this blog, we’ll break down how confidential computing builds end-to-end trust in your infrastructure stack, and how OpenMetal makes it easier to deploy.

What Is End-to-End Trust?

End-to-end trust means that data, software, and workloads stay protected at every layer:

• While stored (encryption at rest)
• While moving (encryption in transit)
• While running (encryption in use via confidential computing)

Most infrastructure handles the first two. But very few address the third—and that’s what makes confidential computing a critical missing piece.

Without protection in use, data is vulnerable while it’s being processed—precisely when it’s most exposed. This is where trusted execution environments (TEEs), such as Intel® Trust Domain Extensions (TDX), come in. TEEs act like a vault around your application, isolating it from everything else—even the operating system and hypervisor. This ensures that only verified workloads can run, and that sensitive data remains sealed off from potential attacks.

When combined with infrastructure that you own and control—like OpenMetal’s bare metal and hosted private cloud—you gain confidence not just in the app layer, but across the full stack: from the hardware to the workload itself.

That kind of layered assurance is critical for teams working with proprietary models, financial transactions, or blockchain logic—anything that needs strong security guarantees beyond the basics. We explain this more in Confidential Computing Benefits and Use Cases.

Why Confidential Computing Needs the Right Infrastructure

The promise of confidential computing breaks down if your infrastructure isn’t built to support it. While the idea of running workloads in secure enclaves sounds great in theory, in practice it depends on the hardware, the virtualization layer, and how much control you have over both.

For instance:

• Shared virtual machines, common in public cloud, can introduce side-channel attack risks—even with memory encryption enabled.
• Oversubscribed hypervisors or hardware introduce inconsistency and latency, reducing the reliability of your secure workloads.
• Proprietary systems often obscure what firmware is running, what BIOS patches are applied, or whether root of trust is validated at boot.

This lack of visibility undermines the very trust confidential computing aims to build. Without verifiable control over each layer—hardware, firmware, hypervisor, and OS—you’re introducing gaps where data could be exposed or policies bypassed.

To truly harden your stack, confidential computing must be paired with infrastructure that’s purpose-built for isolation, transparency, and control.

That means:

• Owning the hardware layer, so there are no noisy neighbors or hidden firmware risks.
• Having full access to virtualization controls so that you can define enclave behavior, attestation policies, and encryption parameters.
• Integrating open-source components so that your architecture is auditable and portable across vendors and environments.

On top of that, consistent performance is key. Many confidential workloads, especially in AI, blockchain, or analytics, require high-throughput, low-latency environments. If your infrastructure isn’t predictable, your confidential applications won’t run efficiently—or securely.

That’s why OpenMetal combines confidential computing with:

• Dedicated bare metal: Full hardware isolation. No noisy neighbors.
• Hosted private cloud environments: Run your stack with open source control using OpenStack, Ceph, and KVM.
• Hardware-level attestation: Verify workloads at boot and runtime.

OpenMetal gives you full-stack ownership, from BIOS to VM, in an infrastructure-as-a-service model that can be deployed in hours—not weeks. You get the speed of cloud with the trust and visibility of on-prem, ideal for use cases where compliance, privacy, and performance cannot be compromised.

With OpenMetal, you can deploy Intel TDX-enabled environments for secure AI training, privacy-preserving VPNs, and blockchain workloads. And because it’s all automated through our provisioning layer, you don’t need to spend weeks setting it up.

Hardware Foundation for Confidential Computing

To support confidential computing workloads, choose from OpenMetal’s v4 bare metal server lineup:

These servers are built for high-throughput, secure workloads. They offer:

• Full hardware isolation
• Optional GPU passthrough
• Encrypted NVMe storage
• BIOS-level transparency

Whether you’re deploying AI models, confidential blockchain validators, or sensitive data pipelines, these systems provide the performance and protection required for confidential computing at scale, secure AI training, privacy-preserving VPNs, and blockchain workloads. And because it’s all automated through our provisioning layer, you don’t need to spend weeks setting it up.

Example Use Cases That Benefit from End-to-End Trust

Here are just a few types of organizations that gain value from confidential computing:

AI & ML Teams

Protect training data, proprietary models, and inference results from theft or tampering—even while they’re in memory. In our Confidential Computing for AI Training blog, we walk through how OpenMetal users deploy TDX-enabled environments with full isolation for model training, plus GPU passthrough for accelerated workloads—all while maintaining data confidentiality during processing.

Web3 / Blockchain Infrastructure

Secure validators or oracles against memory-based attacks and preserve data confidentiality in smart contract computation. In our Confidential Computing Practical Deployment blog, we detail how privacy-first blockchain teams are using OpenMetal’s bare metal with Intel TDX to isolate oracle operations and blockchain data pipelines—ensuring runtime confidentiality and attestation.

Cybersecurity Products

Run threat detection engines, intrusion detection systems (IDS), and advanced malware analysis tools in hardware-isolated environments that prevent tampering—even from rootkits or privileged accounts. By keeping detection logic and telemetry analysis inside trusted execution environments (TEEs), you ensure the integrity of detection and response processes. This is especially useful in environments subject to compliance requirements like FISMA, FedRAMP, or HIPAA.

On OpenMetal, you can deploy these tools on bare metal servers with Intel TDX-enabled CPUs, ensuring attestation at boot and runtime. Pairing confidential computing with full-stack visibility means threats are not just detected, but your security stack itself remains trustworthy.

For more examples and deployment walkthroughs, see How to Deploy Confidential Computing Workloads on OpenMetal Infrastructure.

Built on Open Source. Delivered on Infrastructure You Control.

Many confidential computing solutions are being built on proprietary public clouds, but that introduces a new set of risks: vendor lock-in, limited visibility, and shared responsibility that doesn’t always protect your stack. When you’re relying on a cloud provider to manage key parts of the hypervisor, hardware, or even firmware, you’re giving up the level of control that confidential computing is meant to restore.

OpenMetal’s approach is different.

We run on OpenStack, Ceph, and other open-source projects that align with transparency and portability. Our bare metal gives you direct access to the hardware, and our hosted private clouds give you full tenant isolation and access to the full virtualization stack.

Unlike public cloud offerings, our infrastructure-as-a-service platform delivers:

• Root-level access to all layers – From BIOS and firmware to hypervisor and guest OS, you’re in control.
• Customizable virtualization environments – Build and tune your environment to support enclave configurations and workload-specific needs.
• Portable and auditable architecture – With no black box components, you can validate how your environment is built, maintained, and secured.

By aligning with open source and delivering tenant-controlled private cloud environments, OpenMetal gives you the flexibility of on-prem with the agility of the cloud—without compromising trust.

This combination gives you:

• No vendor lock-in
• Clear ownership boundaries
• Deployments that align with your security and compliance policies

If you care about trust, you need to own your stack—and OpenMetal helps make that possible.

Final Thoughts: Start Building With Trust

Whether you’re running sensitive workloads in AI, blockchain, fintech, or cybersecurity, protecting your data at every layer is no longer optional—it’s a business necessity. As threats become more advanced and regulatory expectations increase, technical teams need infrastructure that doesn’t just promise security—it proves it.

Confidential computing fills a critical gap by protecting data in use, but it only works when paired with infrastructure you can trust across every layer of your stack.. That means owning the hardware layer, customizing your virtualization environment, and maintaining visibility across the full stack.

OpenMetal empowers teams to build and scale secure workloads without compromise. Our platform brings together dedicated bare metal, hosted private clouds, and open source technologies to give you a launchpad for trusted computing—without long procurement cycles or complex integrations.

If your organization is looking for a way to run sensitive workloads securely, without giving up control or performance, now is the time to take action.

Get in touch with our team to explore how we can help harden your infrastructure—or view our product and pricing options to get started today.

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