Intel® Trusted Execution Technology for Server Platforms

“This book is a must have resource guide for anyone who wants to …  implement TXT within their environments.  I wish we had this guide when our engineering teams were implementing TXT on our solution platforms!”

John McAuley,EMC Corporation

“This book details innovative technology that provides significant benefit to both the cloud consumer and the cloud provider when working to meet the ever increasing requirements of trust and control in the cloud.”

Alex Rodriguez,  Expedient Data Centers

“This book is an invaluable reference for understanding enhanced server security, and how to deploy and leverage computing environment trust to reduce supply chain risk.”

Pete Nicoletti. Virtustream Inc.

Intel® Trusted Execution Technology (Intel TXT) is a new security technology that started appearing on Intel server platforms in 2010. This book explains Intel Trusted Execution Technology for Servers, its purpose, application, advantages, and limitations. This book guides the server administrator / datacenter manager in enabling the technology as well as establishing a launch control policy that he can use to customize the server’s boot process to fit the datacenter’s requirements. This book explains how the OS (typically a Virtual Machine Monitor or Hypervisor) and supporting software can build on the secure facilities afforded by Intel TXT to provide additional security features and functions. It provides examples how the datacenter can create and use trusted pools.

With a foreword from Albert Caballero, the CTO at Trapezoid.

What you’ll learn

• It explains why TXT is important and the underlying principles (why it is effective).
• How to enable and provision TXT
• How to create a Launch Control Policy. It discusses trade-offs in determining the right policy for the datacenter, and walks the reader through the process for establishing the policy.
• Demonstrates how to set up and use trusted pools and other advanced concepts such as geo-tagging.
• It walks the reader through the process of making Intel TXT work for them and understand that TXT is a building block for current and future enhanced security concepts.

Who this book is for

The primary audience is the Datacenter Manager and members of an IT organization. It will be valuable to executives that need to understand enhanced server security and will provide a guide to OSVs and ISVs not only to understand the application of TXT but also the new opportunities that TXT enables and ways that the OS and applications can take advantage of those new capabilities. This book applies to cloud computing since TXT can be used to provide additional security for both public and private clouds.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Principals of TXT
Chapter 3. TXT Provisioning
Chapter 4. Launch Control Policy
Chapter 5. Opportunities for the OSV and ISVs
Chapter 6. Creating a More Secure Data Center
Chapter 7. Trusted Pools and Cloud Compliance Support
Appendix