Dr. Kapil Vaswani and Dr. Raghav Bhaskar, SPARC Labs, gave a talk on The State of Confidential Computing on 17 June. Here is the summary of the talk as explained by speakers:
Confidential computing has emerged as an advanced security and privacy primitive over the last decade which has the potential to alter our trust in digital services. So, this talk explained confidential computing’s evolution, current state and open problems yet to be solved. The speakers also introduced SPARC, a new research centre working at the intersection of AI and security. The talk also focused on the opportunities surrounding confidential computing for building the next generation of secure AI systems.
Dr. Kapil Vaswani, founder of SPARC, a frontier AI and security lab at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He is a security researcher with interests spanning computer architecture, programming languages, systems, hardware security, and AI security. At Microsoft Research, he led research on problems in confidential computing, privacy-preserving AI, database security, supply chain security, and formally verified hardware. His research has been published in many top-tier conferences such as POPL, PLDI, ASPLOS, MICRO, OSDI, Oakland and USENIX Security. His work has directly led to several products at Microsoft including SQL Server Always Encrypted, Azure Confidential GPU VMs, Azure AI Confidential Inferencing, Azure Confidential Clean Rooms, and Ad Selection API. In his capacity as a volunteer with iSPIRT, he has led the development of the DEPA Inferencing and Training Framework, which are key components of India’s Digital Public Infrastructure for AI. Kapil Vaswani has a PhD from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
Dr. Raghav Bhaskar, principal researcher at SPARC Labs with a focus on artificial intelligence security and sovereignty. He has over 20 years of experience working in Cryptography and Privacy in top industrial research labs, including Microsoft Research, British Telecom Labs, Input Output Research and DATA 61, CSIRO. He founded and led a secure authentication start-up, AppsPicket, from 2014 to 18. He obtained his PhD in Cryptography from INRIA, Paris, in 2006.
SPARC Labs homepage: https://www.sparc-labs.in/
June 2026