A new project aims to achieve trustworthy end-to-end cloud security by leveraging hardware.
Technology Innovation Institute (TII), a global research centre and applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), has announced that its Secure Systems Research Center (SSRC) has partnered with Imperial College London, a prestigious public research university, on a project that seeks to achieve cloud security by leveraging hardware security features.
A trustworthy cloud OS
The three-year research program aims to design a new, trustworthy cloud operating system (OS) stack for future cloud environments that will enhance cloud security. Through exploring how to design OS support around a flexible userspace isolation abstraction, enforced by hardware mechanisms, the project will help ensure a compartmentalized implementation of OS functionality that maintains compatibility with existing cloud workloads with POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface) standards.
Dr. Ray O. Johnson, the CEO of TII, said, “At TII, our focus is to work on breakthrough technology solutions that will make the world a safer and more empowered place. Given that purpose, university and industry partnerships, such as this one between SSRC and Imperial College London, are crucial in helping us combine forces with like-minded researchers around the world to deliver transformative outcomes. Cybersecurity depends on merging cutting-edge hardware and software to fortify systems and preserve confidentiality where needed.”
Focused on the future
Speaking on the announcement, Dr. Shreekant Thakkar, Chief Researcher at SSRC, said the research will focus on heterogeneous cloud environments in the provision of systems security and will span areas such as the OS, hypervisors, and will leverage hardware security offered in the ARM TrustZone architecture. The project will use silicon based on the ARM and RISC-V architectures, which are likely to play a more significant role in future data centers and cloud environments and deliver enhanced cloud security.
Dr. Thakkar, added, “The research project with Imperial College aims to find solutions based on AArch64, and it fits nicely with other research and uses cases as SSRC is doing a lot of work on ARM-based and RISC-V platforms and on OS in phones and drones. Easily applicable to today’s mobile devices, the project’s solutions will simplify the unification of cloud and edge security approaches.
“To advance quickly, our research work will utilize ongoing research results by the Large Scale Data & Systems Group (LSDS) at Imperial College London on trusted execution support, library OSs, hardware security mechanisms, and cloud security approaches.”
Hardware-assisted
Professor Peter Pietzuch, Professor of Distributed Systems at Imperial College London, said, “We are pleased to join forces with TII’s Secure Systems Research Center on this bold and groundbreaking project. While cloud security mostly focuses on software-based solutions, this research project will aim to develop the specific technologies for system security regarding lightweight hardware-assisted container isolation.”
One of seven initial dedicated research centres at TII, SSRC seeks to create a global centre of excellence in the development of end-to-end security and resilience to protect cyber-physical and autonomous systems. SSRC has recently become a strategic member of RISC-V International, a Switzerland-based global nonprofit promoting an open standard that facilitates collaboration and innovation in computer chip technology.
Last year saw the launch of TII’s secure cloud technologies programme, which includes research on cloud security. Thus, the project will leverage hardware to bolster cloud security.
