The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has released a draft report, NIST Interagency Report (NISTIR) 8320D, Hardware Enabled Security: Hardware-Based Confidential Computing, for public comment. NISTIR 8320D is the latest in a series of reports on hardware-enabled security techniques and technologies.
Organizations employ a growing volume of machine identities, often numbering in the thousands or millions per organization. Machine identities, such as secret cryptographic keys, can be used to identify which policies need to be enforced for each machine. Centralized management of machine identities helps streamline policy implementation across devices, workloads, and environments. However, the lack of protection for sensitive data in use (e.g., machine identities in memory) puts it at risk.
This report presents an effective approach for overcoming security challenges associated with creating, managing, and protecting machine identities throughout their lifecycle. It describes a proof-of-concept implementation, a prototype, that addresses those challenges by using hardware-based confidential computing. The report is intended to be a blueprint or template that the general security community can use to validate and utilize the described implementation.
The public comment period for this draft is open through April 10, 2023. See the publication details for a copy of the draft and instructions for submitting comments. You can also contact us at hwsec@nist.gov.
NOTE: A call for patent claims is included on page ii of this draft. For additional information, see the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) Patent Policy – Inclusion of Patents in ITL Publications.
