  Digital services have been offered through remote systems for decades. The
questions of how these systems can be built in a trustworthy manner and how
their security properties can be understood are given fresh impetus by recent
hardware developments, allowing a fuller, more general, exploration of the
possibilities than has previously been seen in the literature. Drawing on and
consolidating the disparate strains of research, technologies and methods
employed throughout the adaptation of confidential computing, we present a
novel, dedicated Confidential Remote Computing (CRC) model. CRC proposes a
compact solution for next-generation applications to be built on strong
hardware-based security primitives, control of secure software products'
trusted computing base, and a way to make correct use of proofs and evidence
reports generated by the attestation mechanisms. The CRC model illustrates the
trade-offs between decentralisation, task size and transparency overhead. We
conclude the paper with six lessons learned from our approach, and suggest two
future research directions.
