Windows 10: Intel Advances Silicon-Based Security for AI and Blockchain Workloads

Brink · Jun 20, 2018

The future of a trusted and secure computing environment hinges on our collective ability to deliver solutions that improve the performance across a variety of workloads, while also optimizing security.

This week, at Cyber Week in Israel, I am joined by partners, customers, and cybersecurity industry and policy leaders from across the globe. Intel is committed to providing silicon-based security solutions that address the most pressing issues. There are three key themes at the conference, highlighting the challenges and opportunities facing our industry.

Emerging Workloads Deliver More Data to Analyze and Secure

Incoming data is increasingly difficult to effectively leverage without the computing power to process and learn from its growing volume and complexity. Machine learning (ML) algorithms, and other artificial intelligence (AI) applications and capabilities, have achieved remarkable results and are being extensively used in different domains. ML algorithms often require access to sensitive data, especially as the focus on data privacy increases around the world. Limiting access to the right data may limit the outcomes that can be achieved with the use of AI. In the case of blockchain, the security and privacy of data join transaction scalability as key technical considerations.

Intel technologies provide unique capabilities that can help improve the privacy, security and scalability for data-centric workloads like AI and blockchain. We are in a position to accelerate customer success by helping protect algorithms and data for AI applications as well as digital assets and smart contract execution for blockchain solutions.

At Cyber Week, we are focused on security for these two data-centric workloads: AI and blockchain. Technologies like Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX) enable the ecosystem to design solutions with improved security and privacy. What makes Intel SGX compelling is that it provides a hardware trusted execution environment (TEE), allowing better protections for data in-use, at-rest and in-transit. Also, built-in CPU instructions and platform enhancements provide cryptographic assertions for the code that is permitted to access the data. If the code is altered or tampered, then access is denied and the environment disabled.

Security for AI: Efforts Focus on Securing AI Data

We see security, in the context of AI, in two implementations. First, there is security for AI, where we focus on protecting data, algorithms and parameters. Second is AI for security, where we use AI for the detection of advanced exploits. The Advanced Platform Telemetry capability in our Intel® Threat Detection Technology is a step toward improving the outcomes of AI for security.

In security for AI, a couple of usages start integrating security to improve the outcomes that AI solutions can deliver. First is multiparty machine learning, where access to critical data and the integrity of algorithms are enabled by using homomorphic encryption and hardware-based trusted execution environments, like Intel SGX. Second is federated learning, for applications where one can’t move the data to a centralized location. In this usage, data owners at the edge work collaboratively to improve a shared prediction model.

At Cyber Week, we are highlighting several collaborations to add security to AI implementations.

We are collaborating with Docker* to help make AI more secure, useful and shareable for federated learning, by hardening containers with Intel silicon-based security technologies.

Intel researchers are making great strides toward practical methods for homomorphic encryption, a method that will allow computer systems to perform calculations on encrypted information without first decrypting. Duality* is collaborating with Intel to explore the security challenges of AI workloads using homomorphic encryption on Intel platforms. Duality* will use homomorphic encryption across every stage of an AI solution pipeline to minimize data exposure.

Fortanix* announced enhancements to its Runtime Encryption solution to help enable secure execution of ML algorithms, using Intel SGX enclaves, with support for Python and R languages commonly used in research and modeling. This, in turn, supports secure data sharing and analysis for AI training models and applications.

Security for Blockchain: Industry Adoption and Collaboration

Blockchain continues to show promise in transforming business processes. Intel processor technologies offer capabilities to help improve the security, scalability and privacy of distributed ledger networks. At Cyber Week, we are introducing innovations in what we call “off-chain computing” to help address both privacy and throughput for blockchain implementations. We are also highlighting recently announced collaborations.

Enigma* has developed a unique privacy protocol that uses Intel SGX to protect data, while allowing computation over the data. In our collaboration, we’ll work together to integrate this functionality for private smart contracts on the Ethereum public ledger.

Two weeks ago, Intel joined SAP* to formalize efforts in a blockchain consortium to construct a blockchain proof of concept to improve international shipping efficiencies on SAP’s blockchain-as-a-service platform.

Last month, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange*, Accenture* and The Floor* announced the development of a new blockchain securities lending platform powered by Intel. This platform will transform the securities lending market in Israel by enabling direct lending among all the major financial instruments.

Security is pivotal to our company’s strategy and a fundamental underpinning for all workloads, especially those that are as data-centric as AI and blockchain. We will continue to innovate and make our silicon an active participant in the threat defense lifecycle. The announcements at Cyber Week underscore the value that our investments can deliver to meet the cybersecurity needs of organizations today.

Rick Echevarria,
Vice president in the Software and Services Group and general manager of the Platforms Security Division at Intel Corporation.
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Source: https://newsroom.intel.com/editorial...ain-workloads/

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Brink · Jun 21, 2018

RSA 2018 - Intel Announces Silicon-Level Security Technologies

Today’s cybersecurity landscape is constantly evolving with emerging threats, which means we must be vigilant in delivering solutions that protect customers and their data. Given the cybersecurity axiom that hardware is the foundation for innovation and is the root of trust, Intel has long been focused on driving security innovation from the silicon to applications and from the client device to the edge and to the cloud.

In the past year alone, we’ve partnered with industry leaders to help promote future security-based workloads like confidential computing and blockchain, and we introduced Intel® Secure Device Onboard for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. More recently, we highlighted the steps we are taking to build protections into our hardware for the side channel vulnerabilities disclosed in early January.

More: Security Exploits and Intel Products (Press Kit) | Security Research Findings (Intel.com)

Today, we are taking another step forward, with two new technology announcements: Intel® Threat Detection Technology (Intel® TDT), a set of silicon-level capabilities that will help the ecosystem detect new classes of threats, and Intel® Security Essentials, a framework that standardizes the built-in security features across Intel processors. We are also announcing a strengthened academic partnership with Purdue University, to help accelerate the development and availability of cybersecurity talent.

Introducing Intel Threat Detection Technology

Intel Threat Detection Technology leverages silicon-level telemetry and functionality to help our industry partners improve the detection of advanced cyberthreats and exploits. Today we are announcing the first two Intel Threat Detection Technology capabilities, including implementation plans by Microsoft* and Cisco*.

The first new capability is Accelerated Memory Scanning. Current scanning technologies can detect system memory-based cyberattacks, but at the cost of CPU performance. With Accelerated Memory Scanning, the scanning is handled by Intel’s integrated graphics processor, enabling more scanning, while reducing the impact on performance and power consumption. Early benchmarking on Intel test systems show CPU utilization dropped from 20 percent to as little as 2 percent.

Microsoft will integrate Accelerated Memory Scanning into Microsoft Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection’s (ATP)* antivirus capability, which is available now.

The second Intel Threat Detection Technology is Intel Advanced Platform Telemetry. Intel Advanced Platform Telemetry combines platform telemetry with machine learning algorithms to improve the detection of advanced threats, while reducing false positives and minimizing performance impact. The first Cisco product to take advantage of this integration will be the Cisco Tetration* platform, which provides data center security and cloud workload protection.

I am excited about the progress we are making, together with these key partners, to pioneer innovations across silicon and software to help protect customers from emerging threats.

Intel Security Essentials: Built-in Security Foundation

Today we are also launching Intel Security Essentials, which will ensure a consistent set of critical root-of-trust hardware security capabilities across Intel® Core™, Intel Xeon and Intel Atom® processors. These capabilities are platform integrity technologies for secure boot, hardware protections (for data, keys and other digital assets), accelerated cryptography and trusted execution enclaves to protect applications at runtime.

This standard set of capabilities will accelerate trusted computing as customers build solutions rooted in hardware-based protections. Further, these capabilities, directly integrated into Intel silicon, are designed to improve the security posture of computing, lower the cost of deploying security solutions and minimize the impact of security on performance.

Strengthening Academic Partnership with Purdue University

Intel is committed to being an active partner in the security ecosystem. The tech industry has a well-documented shortage of cybersecurity talent. To meet today’s cybersecurity challenges, we need the industry and academia to accelerate the development and availability of the next generation of security-minded professionals.

To that end, we are strengthening cybersecurity partnerships with academia to advance research and begin to close the talent gap in the industry. Today, Purdue University is announcing the launch of its Design for Security Badge Program for students and professionals, developed in partnership with Intel.

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Several other partners will be making announcements at RSA this week, so I encourage everyone at the conference to stop by our booth (#3435 in North Hall) to learn more.

Intel is committed to helping secure the digital world, beginning with a secure foundation at the silicon level. Together with our industry partners – and in line with our security first pledge – we will continue to work tirelessly to safeguard our customers and their data.
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Source: https://newsroom.intel.com/editorial...tion-rsa-2018/

btarunr · Jun 21, 2018

Intel Invests $1 Billion in the AI Ecosystem

The following is an opinion editorial provided by Brian Krzanich, chief executive officer of Intel Corporation. At Intel, we have an optimistic and pragmatic view of artificial intelligence's (AI) impact on society, jobs and daily life that will mimic other profound transformations - from the industrial to the PC revolutions. Our belief is that AI will bring significant new opportunities to transform business - from retail to healthcare to manufacturing - and have an immensely positive impact on society.

AI will make the impossible possible: advancing research on cancer, Parkinson's disease and brain disorders; helping to find missing children; and furthering scientific efforts in climate change, space exploration and oceanic research. To drive AI innovation, Intel is making strategic investments spanning technology, R&D and partnerships with business, government, academia and community groups. We are deeply committed to unlocking the promise of AI: conducting research on neuromorphic computing, exploring new architectures and learning paradigms. We have also invested in startups like Mighty AI, Data Robot and Lumiata through our Intel Capital portfolio and have invested more than $1 billion in companies that are helping to advance artificial intelligence.

I believe Intel will be the AI platform of choice, offering unmatched reliability, performance, security and integration. We are 100 percent committed to creating the roadmap of optimized products to support emerging mainstream AI workloads.

AI solutions require a wide range of power and performance to meet application needs, and Intel has the largest selection of options for our customers to choose from. To support the sheer breadth of future AI workloads, businesses will need unmatched flexibility and infrastructure optimization so that both highly specialized and general purpose AI functions can run alongside other critical business workloads. The Intel Nervana AI portfolio delivers this breadth:

Intel Xeon Scalable family - providing highly scalable processors for evolving AI workloads and our purpose-built silicon for the most intensive deep learning training, code-named "Lake Crest"

Intel Mobileye - vision technologies for specialized use cases such as active safety and autonomous driving

Intel FPGAs - programmable accelerators for deep learning inference

Intel Movidius - low-power vision technology provides machine learning at the edge

AI is still in its infancy, and as this space evolves, we'll continue to advance disruptive approaches in compute that support the complex workloads of today and tomorrow.

Brink · Jun 21, 2018

Intel Advancing Security at the Silicon Level

Hardware-based Protection Coming to Data Center and PC Products Later this Year

In addressing the vulnerabilities reported by Google Project Zero earlier this year, Intel and the technology industry have faced a significant challenge. Thousands of people across the industry have worked tirelessly to make sure we delivered on our collective priority: protecting customers and their data. I am humbled and thankful for the commitment and effort shown by so many people around the globe. And, I am reassured that when the need is great, companies – and even competitors – will work together to address that need.

But there is still work to do. The security landscape is constantly evolving and we know that there will always be new threats. This was the impetus for the Security-First Pledge I penned in January. Intel has a long history of focusing on security, and now, more than ever, we are committed to the principles I outlined in that pledge: customer-first urgency, transparent and timely communications, and ongoing security assurance.

More: Security Exploits and Intel Products (Press Kit) | Security Research Findings (Intel.com)

Today, I want to provide several updates that show continued progress to fulfill that pledge. First, we have now released microcode updates for 100 percent of Intel products launched in the past five years that require protection against the side-channel method vulnerabilities discovered by Google. As part of this, I want to recognize and express my appreciation to all of the industry partners who worked closely with us to develop and test these updates, and make sure they were ready for production.

With these updates now available, I encourage everyone to make sure they are always keeping their systems up-to-date. It’s one of the easiest ways to stay protected. I also want to take the opportunity to share more details of what we are doing at the hardware level to protect against these vulnerabilities in the future. This was something I committed to during our most recent earnings call.

While Variant 1 will continue to be addressed via software mitigations, we are making changes to our hardware design to further address the other two. We have redesigned parts of the processor to introduce new levels of protection through partitioning that will protect against both Variants 2 and 3. Think of this partitioning as additional “protective walls” between applications and user privilege levels to create an obstacle for bad actors.

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These changes will begin with our next-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (code-named Cascade Lake) as well as 8th Generation Intel® Core™ processors expected to ship in the second half of 2018. As we bring these new products to market, ensuring that they deliver the performance improvements people expect from us is critical. Our goal is to offer not only the best performance, but also the best secure performance.

But again, our work is not done. This is not a singular event; it is a long-term commitment. One that we take very seriously. Customer-first urgency, transparent and timely communications, and ongoing security assurance. This is our pledge and it’s what you can count on from me, and from all of Intel.

Brian Krzanich,
Chief executive officer of Intel Corporation
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Source: https://newsroom.intel.com/editorial...silicon-level/

Windows 10: Intel Advances Silicon-Based Security for AI and Blockchain Workloads

Intel Advances Silicon-Based Security for AI and Blockchain Workloads

Intel Advances Silicon-Based Security for AI and Blockchain Workloads

Intel Advances Silicon-Based Security for AI and Blockchain Workloads

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