Hardware-Enabled Security: Policy-Based Governance in Trusted Container Platforms

Published

April 20, 2022

Author(s)

Michael Bartock, Murugiah Souppaya, Haidong Xia, Raghu Yeluri, Uttam Shetty, Brandon Lum, Mariusz Sabath, Harmeet Singh, Alaa Youssef, Gosia Steinder, Yu Cao, Jayashree Ramanathan

Abstract

In today's cloud data centers and edge computing, attack surfaces have significantly increased, cyber attacks are 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 foundation 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 prototype implementation of the approach intended to be a blueprint or template for the general security community.

Citation

NIST Interagency/Internal Report (NISTIR) - 8320B

Report Number

8320B

NIST Pub Series

NIST Interagency/Internal Report (NISTIR)

Pub Type

NIST Pubs

Download Paper

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

Local Download

Keywords

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

Citation

Bartock, M. , Souppaya, M. , Xia, H. , Yeluri, R. , Shetty, U. , Lum, B. , Sabath, M. , Singh, H. , Youssef, A. , Steinder, G. , Cao, Y. and Ramanathan, J. (2022), Hardware-Enabled Security: Policy-Based Governance in Trusted Container Platforms, NIST Interagency/Internal Report (NISTIR), National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, [online], https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.IR.8320B, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=934361 (Accessed April 19, 2024)