#ALGORITHMS: "Cloud Security Hardened with Hardware"

There's a new sheriff guaranteeing security to cloud users with a footprint so small that malware has no place to hide from it. Called the Strongly Isolated Computing Environment by its IBM and North Carolina State inventors, SICE uses the hardware on x86 multi-core processors to isolate secure cloud resources.






Professor Peng Ning, of the computer science department of the engineering school at North Carolina State University wrote 300 lines of code as all that needs to be trusted in order to ensure security.

Cloud security has special needs, especially public clouds where your data may be stored and processed on the same servers as your competitors. However, by repurposing the System Management Mode (SMM) hardware on x86 multi-core processors, IBM and North Carolina State University claim that secure isolated partitions can be easily managed, results that will be presented at this month's ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (Oct. 17-21, 2011, Chicago, Ill.)
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