- Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) has unveiled a remote verification platform called “Project Amber.” These are the details.
During the second day of the inaugural Intel Vision event, Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) decided to focus on how the company will meet the growing security needs of organizations.
In this case, Intel decided to focus on trust. And Intel has introduced an independent trust authority in the form of an innovative service-based security implementation code-named Project Amber. Plus the company also demonstrated its focus on enabling secure and responsible AI and outlined its strategy to further build quantum-resistant cryptography for the coming quantum computing era.
Trust Assurance For A Hybrid Workforce
Businesses operate in and depend on the cloud for supporting remote workforces that require multiple devices, uninterrupted access, and collaboration tools. And technology solutions need to secure data not only in memory and in transit, but also while in use – protecting valuable assets and minimizing attack surfaces.
Project Amber offers organizations remote verification of the trustworthiness of a compute asset in the cloud, edge, and on-premises environments. This service operates independently of the infrastructure provider hosting the confidential compute workloads. And confidential computing, the protection of data in use by performing the computation in a hardware-based trusted execution environment (TEE), is a growing market.
Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX) – available on the Intel Xeon Scalable platform – is one of the main technologies powering confidential computing today, enabling cloud-use cases that are beneficial for organizations that handle sensitive data on a regular basis.
In a confidential computing environment, trust is established through a process called attestation. And the verification of this trustworthiness is a critical requirement for customers to protect their data and intellectual property as they move sensitive workloads to the cloud. In order to raise trust assurance and drive forward the promise of confidential computing for the broader industry, Intel announced Project Amber as the first step in creating a new multi-cloud, multi-TEE service for third-party attestation:
1.) Designed to be cloud-agnostic, this service will support confidential computing workloads in the public cloud, within the private/hybrid cloud, and at the edge. Interposing a third party to provide attestation helps provide objectivity and independence to enhance confidential computing assurance to users.
2.) In the first version, Project Amber intends to support confidential compute workloads deployed as bare metal containers, virtual machines (VMs), and containers running in virtual machines using Intel TEEs. The initial release will support Intel TEEs, with plans to extend coverage to platforms, devices, and other TEEs in the future.
3.) Intel is also working with independent software vendors (ISVs) to enable trust services that include Project Amber. New software tools, such as published APIs that enable ISVs to incorporate Project Amber to augment software and services, will complement Intel’s platforms and technologies, and bring more value to customers and partners.
Intel is planning to launch a customer pilot of Project Amber in the second half of 2022, followed by general availability in the first half of 2023.
Setting Up Secure And Responsible AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) propels technology even further, enabling insights and automation to handle greater scale. And with this proliferation of sensitive information, the threat landscape grows, as do the surrounding security concerns. This is why Intel is committed to developing artificial intelligence that is secure and responsible. The goal of this technology is to contribute to improving our society.
Maintaining data integrity, accuracy, and privacy are considered the heart of Intel’s industry-leading research efforts. And Intel demonstrated how it is accelerating AI deployments in ways that are responsible and secure to help customers and partners solve complex problems:
1.) BeeKeeperAI uses Intel SGX hardware-based security capabilities and Microsoft Azure’s confidential computing infrastructure to provide a zero-trust platform. And it enables an AI algorithm to compute against multiple real-world clinical datasets without compromising the privacy of the data or the intellectual property of the algorithm model. This is accelerating healthcare AI development and deployment innovation by more than 30% to 40% when compared to the current method.
2.) Intel’s research partnership with the University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine’s Federated Tumor Segmentation, or FeTS initiative, uses a set of Intel hardware and open-source software technologies to improve the training of AI models to locate brain tumors. Intel technology helps ensure each institution can participate in improving the fidelity and quality of the inferencing algorithms by using Open Federated Learning (OpenFL). And OpenFL enabled 55 institutions across six continents to collaborate while preserving the security and privacy of their individual datasets. The result is an AI model that improves efforts to locate tumors by 33%.
The responsible use of artificial intelligence also serves as an example of how the industry can come together and pave the path for deployment across verticals that include healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, retail, entertainment, etc.
Quantum-Resistant Cryptography For a Secure Quantum Computing Future
As quantum technology is continuing to develop, post-quantum experts anticipate a moment in the next 10 to 15 years when, as an industry, it will reach a similar situation as the “millennium bug.” Many are calling it “Y2Q.”
Quantum computing impacts both symmetric and public-key cryptography. And it will require the entire ecosystem to bring ingenuity and collaboration to find solutions. To be Y2Q-ready or quantum-resistant by 2030, the time to act is now. Intel has been developing a rich cryptography technology pipeline to lead the industry with innovations that are quantum-resistant, including the built-in crypto acceleration in the 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable platform that provides next-generation security without sacrificing performance.
Intel has been working proactively to address threats posed by quantum computers. And the company developed crypto guidelines for Intel products, actively contributed to post-quantum crypto standardization efforts, and is evaluating the new families of crypto algorithms being considered for standardization by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Intel has adopted a phased approach to address threats posed by quantum computing:
1.) Address the problem of data harvesting by increasing key and digest sizes for symmetric crypto algorithms.
2.) Increase the robustness of code signing applications such as authentication of firmware and software with quantum-resistant algorithms. This helps guard against attacks that break classical crypto to run malicious code.
3.) Secure the internet with post-quantum crypto algorithms standardized by NIST. This includes key encapsulation and digital signature algorithms fundamental to securing transactions over the web.
KEY QUOTE:
“As organizations continue to capitalize on the value of the cloud, security has never been more top of mind. Trust goes hand in hand with security, and it is what our customers expect and require when delivering on Intel technology. With the introduction of Project Amber, Intel is taking confidential computing to the next level in our commitment to a zero-trust approach to attestation and the verification of compute assets at the network, edge, and in the cloud.”
– Greg Lavender, chief technology officer, senior vice president and general manager of the Software and Advanced Technology Group at Intel
