It is helpful to distinguish TEE-based confidential computing from Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). FHE is a cryptographic method that allows computations to be performed directly on ciphertext without ever decrypting it at all. However, FHE is computationally intensive and orders of magnitude slower than standard processing. Confidential Computing bypasses this performance bottleneck by using hardware security to protect the data while it is decrypted safely inside (the locked vault of) the processor.
