Intel Announces "Project Amber" For Verifying The Trustworthiness Of Clouds

Following yesterday's Intel Vision 2022 announcements there is a bit more news today. In particular, Intel is announcing Project Amber.

Project Amber is a new effort from Intel focused on providing an independent trust authority using "an innovative service-based security implementation." Project Amber is supposed to provide organizations with remote verification of the trustworthiness of compute assets in the cloud and is independent of the infrastructure provider of confidential computing workloads.

Project Amber relies upon Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) and other features with Xeon Scalable processors. This attestation service will be cloud-agnostic, work with both public and private clouds, and initially target confidential compute workloads on bare metal containers, VMs, and other container workloads within Intel trusted execution environments.

Details on what Project Amber entails are still light and in advance of today's announcement I was only provided with the brief news blurb. Project Amber is said to be in customer pilot phase for the second half of this year while general availability should happen in H1'2023.

As of writing, there hasn't been much disclosed in the way of technical details around Project Amber for ensuring the trustworthiness of clouds, besides that it will rely on remote attestation.

This Project Amber effort will presumably tie in with Intel's work around TDX guest attestation and other Trust Domain Extensions code they have been working on in recent months for Linux. So we'll see by next year all what entails Intel's Project Amber.