Introduction
In the era where data serves as a new production factor, security has become paramount. Safeguarding financial data — classified as "national critical data resources" within "critical information infrastructure" — is both essential and urgent.
China's 14th Five-Year Plan emphasizes strengthening the digital economy's security framework, enhancing data protection standards, and establishing lifecycle management protocols. The People's Bank of China (PBoC) further mandates encrypted storage for sensitive financial data, encouraging innovative "fine-grained encryption" solutions.
Current Storage Encryption Challenges
1. Application-Level Encryption
- High implementation costs: Requires extensive code modifications
- Hardware dependency: Encryption machines increase operational expenses
- Key vulnerability: Software solutions expose keys in memory
2. Disk Encryption
- Coarse protection granularity: Only prevents physical theft
- Limited internal security: Data remains vulnerable to system-level breaches
Confidential Computing Technology
Confidential computing creates hardware-based trusted execution environments (TEEs) that protect data during processing. Key features include:
- Resource isolation: Dedicated CPU allocations per virtual machine
- Memory encryption: Automatic SM4 encryption/decryption (Chinese national standard)
- Measured launch: Ensures integrity of execution environments
Major implementations:
- Intel SGX
- AMD SEV
- Hygon CSV (used in this solution)
- ARM TrustZone
👉 Learn how leading banks implement TEE solutions
Confidential Computing Storage Solution
Technical Framework
Front-end Encryption Module
- Proxy gateway intercepts and parses data packets
- Executes encryption/decryption within TEE
Management Platform
- Policy configuration (field-level granularity)
- Key lifecycle management
Key Features
| Feature | Benefit |
|---|---|
| Policy Customization | Field-level encryption rules |
| Key Rotation | Periodic updates without downtime |
| Fuzzy Search | Supports encrypted data queries |
| Confidential Containers | Containerized TEE deployment |
Implementation Results
Performance Metrics
| Environment | Throughput (TPS) | Latency Increase |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | 5,120 | Baseline |
| TEE (2-core) | 2,330 (-20%) | 15-20% |
| TEE (6-core) | 4,950 (-3%) | <5% |
👉 See real-world financial security case studies
FAQs
Q: How does this differ from traditional database encryption?
A: Unlike whole-disk encryption, our solution offers field-level protection while maintaining query functionality through specialized cryptographic techniques.
Q: What's the performance impact?
A: In 6-core configurations, the overhead drops below 3%, making it viable for production systems.
Q: Can existing applications use this without modification?
A: Yes, the proxy architecture enables seamless integration—only connection strings need updating.
Future Directions
Financial institutions should explore:
- Full lifecycle encrypted data pipelines
- Multi-party secure computation
- Privacy-preserving analytics
This content was originally published in Financial Electronics (May 2024). All commercial references have been removed for compliance.