The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has released three new draft reports on hardware-enabled security and trusted cloud for public comment. The foundation of any cloud 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 provides the initial protections to help ensure that higher-layer security controls can be trusted.

The three new draft reports are:

• 2^nd Draft NIST Internal Report (IR) 8320, Hardware-Enabled Security: Enabling a Layered Approach to Platform Security for Cloud and Edge Computing Use Cases, examines hardware-enabled security techniques and technologies that can improve platform security and data protection for cloud data centers and edge computing.
• Draft NIST IR 8320B, Hardware-Enabled Security: Policy-Based Governance in Trusted Container Platforms, explains an approach for safeguarding container deployments in multi-tenant cloud environments, as well as a prototype implementation of the approach.
• Draft NIST Special Publication (SP) 1800-19, Trusted Cloud: Security Practice Guide for VMware Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Environments, describes an example solution for using trusted compute pools leveraging hardware roots of trust to monitor, track, apply, and enforce security and privacy policies on cloud workloads.

The public comment period for these drafts is open through December 6, 2021. See the publication details for copies of the drafts and instructions for submitting comments. You can also contact us at hwsec@nist.gov.

NOTE: A call for patent claims is included in each of these drafts. For additional information, see the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) Patent Policy--Inclusion of Patents in ITL Publications.