OCP Foundation unveils Caliptra RoT specification

The Open Compute Project Foundation, an industry collective dedicated to improving hardware systems through open source and open collaboration, has introduced the Caliptra 0.5 specification for silicon root of trust, Security Boulevard reports. OCP says its goal with Caliptra is to integrate trust into each chip and bring uniformity, leading to enhanced cloud security. The main issue is that RoT systems historically have not embraced uniformity, with each being either proprietary or linked to the specifications of an industry standard body, consortium or association. There is no uniform configuration across cloud service providers, the group said. "What the market has come to believe is, ultimately, if we're going to have a trusted environment, we need to embed the capability into the silicon itself," added Clifford Grossner, vice president of market intelligence and innovation at the OCP. According to OCP, Caliptra defines a reusable drop-in silicon block for a root-of-trust management that users can integrate into application-specific integrating circuit hardware, central and graphic processors, system-on-a-chip, hard drives and others. Caliptra will produce verifiable cryptographic assurances declaring the correctness of a particular hardwares security configuration and provide an SoC-based method of ensuring the trustworthiness of a boot code.