NIST’s National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) announces the release of Draft NIST Internal Report (NISTIR) 8320A, Hardware-Enabled Security: Container Platform Security Prototype.

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.

The public comment period is open through January 29, 2021. We welcome your comments and feedback. See the publication details for a copy of the draft and instructions for submitting comments.

NOTE: A call for patent claims is included on page iii of this draft. For additional information, see the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) Patent Policy--Inclusion of Patents in ITL Publications.