Intel on Wednesday unveiled an independent trust authority in the form of a service, code-named Project Amber, to assist with growing security needs of organizations.
Project Amber will provide companies with remote verification of the trustworthiness of a compute asset in the cloud or at the edge and in on-premise locations. It will operate as a service independent of the infrastructure provider hosting confidential work.
Intel said it is working with software vendors to enable trust services that include Project Amber. At first, Project Amber intends to support confidential compute workloads as bare metal containers, virtual machines and containers running in virtual machines using Intel trusted execution environments.
A launch of Project Amber with customers is planned for the second half of 2022 with general availability in the first half of 2023.
Intel currently has Software Guard Extensions in its Xeon Scalable platform for confidential computing. BeeKeeper AI uses SGX hardware security alongside Microsoft Azure’s confidential computing infrastructure for a zero-trust platform.
Intel Chief Technology Officer Greg Lavender introduced Amber and discussed the wide array of cybersecurity vulnerabilities facing enterprises during a keynote on the second day of Intel Vision 2022 on Wedesday. Exploits are increasing so quickly that new ransomware attacks will occur every two seconds by 2031, he said.
Amber will provide "independent verification of customer assets no matter where they run," he said. This includes even in RAM in a computing environment.
Intel also discussed at its Vision event the need for organizations to be “quantum resistant” by 2030, noting its own built-in cryptographic acceleration in the 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable platform.
"Quantum computing will present us a new set of opportunities but we also recognize the startling possibility of quantum computing breaking encryption in mere seconds," Lavender said.
He urged the computing community to work together today to prepare for a post-quantum world. "We have to stop thinking as an industry we're all out for ourselves," he said.
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