Hardware-Enabled Security: Container Platform Security Prototype

Published

June 17, 2021

Author(s)

Murugiah Souppaya, Michael Bartock, Karen Scarfone, Jerry Wheeler, Tim Knoll, Uttam Shetty, Ryan Savino, Joseprabu Inbaraj, Stefano Righi

Abstract

In today's cloud data centers and edge computing, attack surfaces have significantly increased, hacking has become industrialized, and most security control implementations are not coherent or consistent. The foundation of any data center or edge computing security strategy should be securing the platform on which data and workloads will be executed and accessed. The physical platform represents the first layer for any layered security approach and provides the initial protections to help ensure that higher-layer security controls can be trusted. This report explains an approach based on hardware-enabled security techniques and technologies for safeguarding container deployments in multi-tenant cloud environments. It also describes a proof-of-concept implementation of the approach—a prototype—that is intended to be a blueprint or template for the general security community.

Citation

NIST Interagency/Internal Report (NISTIR) - 8320A

Report Number

8320A

NIST Pub Series

NIST Interagency/Internal Report (NISTIR)

Pub Type

NIST Pubs

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.IR.8320A

Local Download

Keywords

container, hardware-enabled security, hardware root of trust, platform security, trusted compute pool, virtualization

Citation

Souppaya, M. , Bartock, M. , Scarfone, K. , Wheeler, J. , Knoll, T. , Shetty, U. , Savino, R. , Inbaraj, J. and Righi, S. (2021), Hardware-Enabled Security: Container Platform Security Prototype, NIST Interagency/Internal Report (NISTIR), National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, [online], https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.IR.8320A, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=932329 (Accessed October 1, 2025)