High Performance Computing
In this digital era and with the exponential increase in data generation, High Performance Computing (HPC) is at the core of major advances and innovations in a wide range of fields such as academic computing, national laboratories, R&D in industry and defense, medicine, etc.
Cybersecurity is a key component of High Performance Computing as it is essential to ensure the protection, availability, confidentiality and authenticity of the data and intellectual property used and generated by those large computing systems.
Data Protection in a World of Big Data
One of the main challenges HPC is facing is the increasing amount of data to be processed very quickly. This requires to fast encryption/decryption of data at a very high performance level to ensure its protection.
To address the challenge of security in High-Performance Computing, Secure IC offers to use fully homomorphic encryption, which allows computations to be performed on encrypted data without decryption. This method saves a lot of time and allows sensitive information to be processed from anywhere without risk to data confidentiality. The typical application for use fully homomorphic encryption would be for the processing of high bandwidth computation through Cloud computing (since embedded computing power might not be enough). So having a use fully homomorphic encryption function in the HPC infrastructure (or in the Cloud) would allow for “less trusted” third party to compute securely this processing. It allows for a secure offloading of high-volume data processing.
Protection of Algorithms & Models
Having a lot of data is one thing, knowing how to use it another and it can be worth a lot of money. Not only the data is valuable, but also the way it is processed (there are applications in the field of artificial intelligence, for instance). Secure-IC protects algorithms in a very thorough approach. Our hardware solution, the integrated Secure Element called SecuryzrTM, can protect codes, firmware and software in terms of confidentiality, integrity and authenticity to ensure what it is called Platform Firmware Resiliency (PFR). For those without access to the device hardware, software solutions can also be deployed through a cryptographic library to provide counter-measures against a wide range of attacks like cache-timing attacks, etc.
Protection of the 24/7 Availability of Large Computations
The availability of these expensive machines is one of the major concerns of HPC. How to protect HPC from malwares and especially ransomwares, to keep it running 24/7 without losing data, time or money? Cybersecurity solutions are again essential to prevent such unwanted software from being installed in those machines.
Secure-IC offers real-time authentication of software programs running on the platform with Cyber Escort UnitTM IP. Integrated side-by-side with the processor, they run at the exact same time. If the Cyber Escort UnitTM detects any abnormality, it is able to immediately trigger an appropriate security policy, which can include immediate processor shut down with a very low latency. This means that computation can be stopped before any data leakage occurs.
With the development of artificial intelligence and Big Data, HPC still has many challenges in the coming decade. Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) is one of them. Secure-IC’s R&D department is ready and a PQC accelerator is already available. It will take HPC performance and security to the next level