Compute hardware platform security

Compute hardware platform security

Consider using Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) to build a chain of trust from server’s firmware to a hypervisor to prevent EoP and tampering attacks to BIOS, MBR, and boot loader that can be implemented by bootkits or ransomware but mostly for the Windows platform. A bootkit is an advanced malware capable to inject itself at a booting stage before OS starts to avoid being detected by a host security solutions such as HIPS (antiviruses). For example, the recent MBR bootkit called HDRoot discovered in 2015 managed to poison MBR to launch later the backdoor as a system service when Windows starts. Another threat is cryptolockers. For example, Petya and Mamba cryptolockers can encrypt Master File Table and disk partitions correspondingly.

To mitigate EoP attacks and tampering attacks, use Trusted Filter for Filter Scheduler in OpenStack that implements Intel TXT to schedule workloads requiring trusted execution only to trusted compute resources. Clusters can have both trusted and untrusted compute resources. Trusted compute resources are grouped into the Trusted Computing Pool.

Workloads not requiring trusted execution can be scheduled on any node, depending on utilization, while workloads with a trusted execution requirement will be scheduled only to trusted nodes.