Anil Rao is VP & GM, Systems Architecture & Engineering, Office of the CTO, Intel Corp.
I am pleased to announce that Intel’s independent attestation service, code named Project Amber, has advanced to Limited Availability. Customers interested in using Project Amber to verify Confidential Computing environments or related workloads will have access to production candidate software. Subscriptions during Limited Availability are available from Microsoft Azure Marketplace or by contacting Intel directly at ProjectAmberLA.intel.com.
Project Amber is a SaaS solution providing remote attestation of the authenticity and integrity of Confidential Computing environments, regardless of network location. Initially, Project Amber will verify the trustworthiness of Trusted Execution Environments based on Intel® Software Guard Extensions and Intel® Trust Domain Extensions (Intel® TDX), but the vision extends to much broader device verification. For example, Nvidia Corp. has already announced that Intel® TDX with Project Amber will attest to their H100 GPUs to help protect confidentiality-preserving AI solutions.
Project Amber offers verification independent of cloud infrastructure providers, which Microsoft Azure has said offers separation of duties for interested customers. The SaaS solution further facilitates implementing the NIST-recommended zero trust model and can be deployed over multiple environments from edge to hybrid to multi-cloud, all while maintaining a single attestation service and consistent security policy.
As a SaaS, Project Amber is convenient to deploy. It provides proof of attestation to relying parties to help comply with privacy-preserving regulations. Intel is committed to its security first pledge. To get the most out of your data you need to be able to trust the systems that run it. Project Amber was built in service of this mission.
More Information
Trust and Security Solutions by Intel
Project Amber Limited Availability web page
Confidential Computing Consortium
Increasing Trust in Confidential Computing with Project Amber a conversation with Intel's chief architect for Project Amber
Anil Rao is vice president in the Intel Office of the CTO and responsible for Security and Systems Architecture for Intel Corporation. Rao leads technical vision, strategy, and architecture for next-generation cloud to edge to client security, heterogeneous systems architecture including disaggregated and container computing, and Graph and Sparse AI.
Rao joined Intel in 2016 with two decades of engineering, product and strategy expertise in cloud and data center technologies. He was a co-founder of SeaMicro Inc. in 2007 developing energy-efficient converged solutions for cloud and data centers. After SeaMicro was acquired by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in 2012, Rao spent three years as corporate vice president of products in AMD’s Data Center Solutions Business Group. He served as technical adviser and strategy consultant to the office of the chief technology officer at Qualcomm until joining Intel.
Rao earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical and communications engineering from Bangalore University in India, a master’s degree in computer science from Arizona State University, and an MBA degree from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a co-author of the Optical Internetworking Forum’s OIF specifications and holds several patents in networking and data center technologies.