CoreOS Announces Tectonic with Distributed Trusted Computing to Secure the Internet

By CIOReview | Thursday, December 10, 2015

FREMONT, CA: With an aim to make the internet more secure, CoreOS, the Linux and Container Company, has introduced Tectonic with Distributed Trusted Computing, reports Steve J Vaughan-Nichols for ZDNet.

Tectonic, based on Google Kubernetes, is the universal Kubernetes solution for deploying, managing and securing clusters of containers and virtual machines on clouds. With Distributed Trusted Computing, which enables enterprises to have cryptographic guarantees about the configuration of their entire environment, Tectonic becomes the most trusted and secure place to develop, run and manage containers.

In addition, Distributed Trusted Computing facilitates supervisors to authenticate and trust individual node and cluster integrity, even in potentially compromised or even unreceptive data center conditions. It allows them to verify system state before distributing app containers, data or secrets; helps them in preventing attacks that involve modifying firmware, bootloader, the OS itself, or the deployment pipeline; and cryptographically verify, with an audit log, what containers have executed on the system.

“Security is central to our mission here at CoreOS. It is rare to be able to introduce a completely new class of computing to the market, and we are proud today to do just that with Distributed Trusted Computing. This is a step further in the security capabilities of enterprises, for the first time cryptographically guaranteed end-to-end integrity and control of their environment,” comments Alex Polvi, CEO, CoreOS.

Available as a configuration to all users of Tectonic, Distributed Trusted Computing is optimized in bare metal configurations and is used to ensure hardware is only running the software that is authorized to run. It also lets customers to put their cryptographic keys into the firmware of their servers, which implies the servers can run only the software clearly approved by the enterprise and nothing else. It delivers advanced security assurance to customers, without vendor lock-in.

The complete trusted computing environment of Tectonic with Distributed Trusted Computing consists cluster, where only secure booted machines are allowed; container runtime; CoreOS Linux operating system; and hardware enablement, which includes Firmware and Trusted Platform Module.