Photo: Google
The cloud runs the world. Given that it’s such a huge source of profit and the fundamental infrastructure of the future, you might assume that Amazon, Google, IBM, and all the cloud companies raking in billions intimately know every piece of hardware, software, and code in their data centers. You’d be wrong.
For hackers, the data center is the target’s brain—one of the most important points of control and one of the highest-value targets. American and Chinese intelligence agencies, two of the most advanced cyber powers in the world, have targeted and breached data centers as part of their most ambitious espionage operations.
Google today is announcing a new open source chip design based on the lessons the company has learned from their first layer of defense in the company’s 19 data centers on five continents: OpenTitan, the open-source version of the two-year-old Titan chip used in those data centers.
OpenTitan aims to cryptographically prove that the machines operating in Google’s $8 billion cloud business can be trusted, haven’t added vulnerabilities, and aren’t surreptitiously under an adversary’s control.
The security guarantee the chip confers is “super critical when you’re running the planet,” says Royal Hansen, the vice president of engineering at Google Cloud.
