The new service will offer users third-party authentication across a range of different environments.
Be a part of it every year Intel Vision Event, the company has officially announced Project Amber, an application aimed at helping businesses protect their computing assets in cloud, edge, and on-premises environments. The new service is expected to provide third-party, remote verifiers with a level of trust in multiple environments.
“As organizations continue to leverage the value of the cloud, security has never been more of a concern. said Greg Lavender, chief technology officer, senior vice president and general manager, Advanced Technologies and Software Group at Intel. “With the birth of Project Amber, Intel is taking confidential computing to the next level in our commitment to a trustless approach to attesting and verifying computing assets at the network, edge and in the cloud.”
According to Intel, the foundation of trust in confidential computing is established through a process known as authentication. Since the verification process is mandatory for organizations aiming for combine and work remotely environment, it is important for businesses to know their employees are working on secure and confidential platforms. Using a hardware-based trusted execution environment (TEE), Intel says it is hoping Project Amber is the first step towards a new multi-cloud, multi-TEE service for third-party authentication. .
For example, Project Amber will serve as an independent attestation service, ensuring that containers do not implement their own verification process. This gives users another level of security when they trust that the environment they are working in is secure and authenticated.
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With the goal of enhancing trust assurance, Intel considers Project Amber to be an independent trustee in an innovative, service-based security implementation. This innovation will provide businesses with assurance that their computing assets in a variety of environments are secure and have been independently verified to be safe. Using a third party for the authentication process is intended to give businesses peace of mind and this will assure businesses that their environment is fully secure.
In the first implementation of Project Amber, Intel expects the service to work on a number of different platforms, deployed as bare metal containers, virtual machines, and containers running in virtual machines using Intel TEE. The first release will support Intel TEE, with plans to expand coverage to other platforms, devices, and TEEs in the future.
The service is set up to be cloud independent, supporting confidential compute workloads in the public cloud and in the private cloud, hybrid cloud, and in edge computing. Trust has become key to many industries today, helping to prevent businesses from being taken advantage of through several different types of malware and ransomware.
Intel says it plans to roll out Project Amber in customer testing in the second half of this year, followed by general enterprise availability in the first half of 2023.
