  Confidentiality, integrity protection, and high availability, abbreviated to
CIA, are essential properties for trustworthy data systems. The rise of cloud
computing and the growing demand for multiparty applications however means that
building modern CIA systems is more challenging than ever. In response, we
present the Confidential Consortium Framework (CCF), a general-purpose
foundation for developing secure stateful CIA applications. CCF combines
centralized compute with decentralized trust, supporting deployment on
untrusted cloud infrastructure and transparent governance by mutually untrusted
parties. CCF leverages hardware-based trusted execution environments for
remotely verifiable confidentiality and code integrity. This is coupled with
state machine replication backed by an auditable immutable ledger for data
integrity and high availability. CCF enables each service to bring its own
application logic, custom multiparty governance model, and deployment scenario,
decoupling the operators of nodes from the consortium that governs them. CCF is
open-source and available now at https://github.com/microsoft/CCF.
