a company might want take their database application, that deal with all sorts of corporate critical sensitive data, and then upload and safely run this application on e.g. Amazon’s EC2, or maybe even to some China-based EC2-clone. Currently there is really nothing that could stop the provider, who has a full control over the kernel or the hypervisor under which our application (or our VM) executes, from reading the contents of our process’ memory and stealing the secrets from there. This is all easy stuff to do from the technical point of view, and this is also not just my own paranoia…
The Invisible Things Lab’s blog: Trusted Execution In Untrusted Cloud