Blog

Confidential Computing:
A tale about trust

Fortanix Confidential Computing Manager™ enables widespread adoption of Confidential Computing with no additional application development or integration costs. Deployment is supported on compatible cloud and on-premises infrastructure with full auditability of how and where data has been used and secured.

Introducing Fortanix DSM Password Manager

You may find this blog as "yet another password manager" blog, and maybe it's true. Knowing there are many options available for a secure password manager is a good position to be in, certainly for anyone who's got hundreds if not thousands of passwords for various web and system administration.

Zero Trust Architecture with Fortanix Enclave Development Platform (EDP)

The most important principle in engineering any complex system is abstraction. Unfortunately, imperfections in these abstractions often result in security vulnerabilities. To build truly trustworthy systems, we need to be able to reason about software at its own abstraction layer without losing generality.

Data Sovereignty and Privacy Compliance Post Schrems II

The past year has had an unprecedented impact on business technology strategies as organizations scrambled to adapt to operating in the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there have also been some seismic shifts in the realm of data privacy and security. How can organizations remain compliant following the Schrems II decision last year?

Six Insights from the 2021 SANS Cloud Security Survey

2021’s SANS Cloud Security Survey has been released and is an important read for security stakeholders within an organization. This blog highlights some of the findings of the survey and analysis from the panel discussion.

5 Best Practices for Enforcing Compliance in the Data-driven World of Finance

With increasing incidents of data breaches being reported, the financial industry comes under more intensive scrutiny from government regulators and authorities concerned. They are subject to regulations that can drastically vary between countries and markets. For example: there are regulations like PCI DSS for credit card data, GDPR for EU data across the globe, GLBA, SOX, and other different laws across the world. The blog explains some of the best practices to meet these compliance standards.

Solving the TPM key provisioning problem with Fortanix Data Security Manager

For the last decade, smart devices have become increasingly integrated into our society. But as our reliance on these devices grows, so does the probability and potential impact of security breaches. In a move towards improving platform security, smart device manufacturers have started integrating Trusted Platform Modules (TPM) into their products.

10 Key Management Best Practices You Should Know

Whether it is personally identifiable information (PII) covered under GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, or other regulations, valuable intellectual property, or other confidential company data, encryption provides strong protection that renders the data useless should it be stolen by cyber criminals. Every time you encrypt a piece of data, you need to use an “encryption key”.

PII Data Security in a Hybrid and Multicloud World

Security practitioners around the world agree unequivocally that encrypting PII data is the best way to protect it. However, a major challenge in this approach is capturing and encrypting PII data at scale especially when the source of data could be transient applications such as containers or non-static serverless functions such as AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, etc. Learn how Fortanix can help secure your PII data.

Life at Fortanix with Julian Weinberger

This isn’t meant to be a love letter to Fortanix--although it might read like one. This is all being said to make a single statement as obvious as possible: Setting yourself up for success begins with an employer who wants you to succeed as badly as you do yourself. You may have a hard time finding this out in the world. But Fortanix is an oasis in that desert.

How will Intel’s “Ice Lake” redefine the scope of data security?

On 6 April 2021, the data security world took a giant leap forward with the launch by Intel® of its 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors -- code-named Ice Lake -- for use in the next generation of server platforms.
Of more direct interest, however, Ice Lake is a processor built for security today and for the new demands of confidential computing.

Fortanix Confidential Computing Manager 3.0

Fortanix Confidential Computing Manager (CCM 3.0) is a comprehensive solution designed from the ground up to be best in class and to provide a “single pane of glass” through which you can manage all your confidential computing deployments. Here we describe some of the features and attributes that make CCM 3.0 the most flexible and intuitive enterprise solution available for confidential computing deployments.

Fortanix Unlocks the Power of Confidential Computing

Just under five years ago Fortanix was founded on the vision of a new approach to security: Confidential Computing. A few years and many technical challenges later, this vision took a big step forward today with the announcement by Intel, Fortanix strategic partner and investor, of their Ice Lake 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors.

International Women’s Day - Let’s Inspire, Empower & Change

Today we are celebrating International Women’s Day and here at Fortanix, women are unstoppable. Whether it is engineering, sales, marketing, product, or design, it is difficult to find a field where they have not set their foothold.

How SolarWinds Busted Up Our Assumptions About Code Signing

As the fallout from the SolarWinds hack broadens, we continue to learn more about just how it happened in the first place. There have now been four malware strains identified, one being Sunspot, which was installed on the SolarWinds build server that developers use to piece together software applications.

5 Tips to Bolster your Multicloud Data Security

According to IDC, 2021 will be the year of multicloud as the pandemic reaffirms the critical need for business agility. Business is all about speed. Every organization today is focused on building an infrastructure that can enable them to innovate at speed and stay ahead of the competition.

Simplifying Cybersecurity: It’s All About The Data

Why is cybersecurity be so complex? It need not be. All we are doing is controlling what data is accessible by whom (person) or what (application). Customers already provide identity (identity and access management/single sign-on) and the access control policies that dictate access to systems and data.

Key Management within Multi-Cloud Environments

Most of the enterprise adopters of public cloud services opt for a multi-cloud strategy. The multi-cloud strategy provides an enterprise with the flexibility of avoiding vendor lock-in and utilize best of breed solutions of mega-vendors.

Announcing Fortanix Self-Defending KMS integration with Cohesity

Fortanix-Cohesity solution provides integrated key management, HSM,encryption and tokenization to protect backup data from ransomware,data breaches and avoid regulatory penalties.

Celebrate Data Privacy Day with a CISO and CDO Meeting of the Minds

There is no better way to celebrate Data Privacy Day than by bringing together the two people in the organization who most influence data privacy strategies - the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and the Chief Data Officer (CDO).

Insights from 2020: Acceleration in Cloud Adoption and Remote Work Drive the Need for Data Security

As the clock strikes midnight on the eve of December 31st,2020 and the new year wishes start pouring in from family and friends, we bring to close what can easily be called the most unprecedented year for mankind at least over the last few decades.

Lessons from Forrester’s “Best Practices: Cloud Data Encryption” Report

Until a decade back, encryption was only a nice to have security measure for most enterprises. But over the last decade, there has been increasing incidents of data breaches stemming from unencrypted sensitive data. With data and workloads moving to the cloud at an accelerated pace, it has become more complex to manage and secure sensitive data.

Securing Healthcare AI with Confidential Computing

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) within healthcare and the life sciences represents one of the most exciting and valuable areas of scientific research. With ever increasing amounts of data available to train new models and the promise of new medicines and therapeutic interventions, the use of AI within healthcare is expected to provide substantial benefits to patients.

Why Secrets Management is Critical to DevOps Pipeline Security

Business is all about speed. Companies want to innovate and deliver functionality faster to remain competitive. This explains the increasing popularity of DevOps as a go-to model for rapid application delivery. A recent Gartner report indicated that DevOps adoption is a growing alternative to traditional waterfall and agile development methodologies, but also pointed to key challenges with security and compliance.

Protecting Data from Breaches Requires an Encryption Key Management Strategy

Data breaches have only been increasing and its estimated that nearly 1.5 billion people will have their personal data exposed through data breaches in 2020. How can you take steps to safeguard the customer, employee, and patient data you are entrusted to protect?

Microsoft AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) Secrets Injection with Fortanix Self-Defending KMS

I started writing about Secrets injection in a kubernetes environment for my own personal benefit, especially to provide a secure way of sharing secrets apps running on DOKS.

Data Security Encryption Approaches Deliver Varying Levels of MultiCloud Data Security

According to Gartner, 81 percent of businesses are adopting a hybrid cloud and multicloud strategy. The challenges of protecting data and using encryption across public/private cloud, SaaS, and on-premises environments increase complexity, cost and security risk.

Fortanix Confidential Containers on Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

The Quest for Security, Agility, and Control of Containerized Workloads. In this blog, we will discuss how developers can make application containers confidential with Fortanix and deploy these containers within the Microsoft AKS platform.

Using Tokenization to Protect Sensitive Application Data on DevOps Teams

DevOps is fast becoming the standard approach for building software and speeding up application delivery. The recent Oracle-KPMG Threat report 2020 highlights the broad adoption of DevOps across a wide spectrum of enterprises, with nearly two-thirds of respondents already employing DevOps or planning to do so over the next 12-24 months.

The Role of Confidential Computing in Protecting Cloud Applications and Sensitive Data from Breaches

According to the Confidential Computing Consortium: “Confidential computing is the protection of data in use using hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEE). A Trusted Execution Environment is commonly defined as an environment that provides a level of assurance of data integrity, data confidentiality, and code integrity.

Cloud-Scale HSM and Key Management for BIG-IP and NGINX TLS

Nearly 90% of all internet traffic is encrypted with TLS. F5 solutions including BIG-IP and NGINX provide SSL orchestration using TLS encryption, which requires a hardware security module (HSM) and key management system (KMS) to execute and protect the cryptographic operations and keys.

How SaaS Vendors can Build Trust with Customers By Enabling Zero Trust in their Software

Just like in life, trust is a critical factor in cloud computing. Throughout my journey developing SaaS based products, one question I have constantly heard from potential clients is “where is the data stored?” and “Can I limit your employees' access to our sensitive data?”.

Zero Trust – The Importance of Cryptography, Key Management, and Confidential Computing

Zero trust architecture promises to solve many of today’s challenges in information security. Here, we look at what “zero trust” means, the role of cryptography in implementing a zero trust architecture, and the importance of key management. We also detail how confidential computing enables zero trust to be taken to the next level.

Encryption is Easy, Key Management is Hard

Congratulations! All your sensitive PII data is encrypted. (Probably. You’re never quite sure what the DevOps team is up to).

Using Confidential Computing to Protect Function-as-a-Service Data

Organizations are embracing the power of Function-as-a-Service (FaaS). FaaS can be viewed as a very positive and beneficial result coming from years of data successfully migrating and operating in public clouds. AWS Lambda, Azure Functions and Google Cloud are today’s market leading platforms for enterprises to realize the power and benefits of FaaS.

Fortanix Secures VMware Infrastructure on Google Cloud

Nearly all enterprises have made a significant investment in VMware infrastructure and now want to embrace migrating those workloads to hybrid and public clouds such as Google Cloud. Google Cloud VMware Engine is the only service that allows you to consume dedicated VMware Cloud environments on Google Cloud.

Announcing Fortanix Enclave Development Platform integration with Fortanix Confidential Computing Manager

Today, we are excited to extend the benefits of Fortanix Confidential Computing Manager to developers who have been using Fortanix EDP to build secure enclaves.

Part 3 - Keeping the Keys to Your Kingdom: Google and Fortanix Collaborate to Deliver “BYOKMS”

Since announcing the integration in November 2019, we have been working with many large enterprises to incorporate this new service and we have learned a lot during the process. In this blog, we explain some of the common requirements large enterprises have for implementing external key management and describe how Fortanix Self-Defending KMS meets those requirements.

Secure Your Containers With Confidential Computing In The Cloud

Development and deployment of container-based software has become a popular movement in technology. Docker, and container technology in general, has redefined cloud computing and offers significant benefits to developers and companies, including efficiency, cost savings, consistency, reliability, and scalability for the entire DevOps processes.

Retaining Encryption Keys

One of the many issues that keeps CISOs up at night is the realization that no matter how robust and comprehensive their cybersecurity is, their IT systems are likely to be breached at some point.

The Business Case for Enterprise Key Management

How an enterprise key management system can prevent data breaches, produce efficiency savings, simplify compliance, and enable digital transformation

Keeping your app’s secrets secret

The software development process has vastly changed in this past decade. Thanks to the relentless efforts of the cloud and virtualization technology providers, we now have nearly limitless compute and storage resources at our fingertips. One may think of this as the first wave of automation within the application development and deployment process.

Keeping Data Secure and Confidential in Public Clouds Encryption®

In 2020, enterprises need to look to new encryption technologies paired with key management to protect sensitive data, particularly in cloud and multi-cloud environments.

IBM and Fortanix: Taking on the Public Cloud Data Security Challenge

When it comes to digital business transformation, it’s all about the data. The digital economy is built on the foundation of digital trust. Digital trust relies on protecting sensitive data across its entire lifecycle. According to IDC, by 2025, more than half of all data will be running in the public cloud.

Modernizing Your HSMs

HSMs were introduced, enabling commercial encryption and large-scale data protection for the first time. Guess what -- you’re still using them today and they haven’t changed that much. HSMs play an important role in safeguarding encryption keys but they are expensive, complex to management and are not ready to support public cloud.

Confidential Computing and Machine Learning - Running TensorFlow Models Inside Secure Enclaves with Fortanix Runtime Encryption®

In this blog we will discuss the challenges and benefits of using the TensorFlow (TF) library to deploy machine learning (ML) models on the Fortanix Confidential Computing Platform™, followed by simple step-by-step instructions to get you started.

Primary key holder

Data security in the cloud has often been assumed, but now it needs to be assured. Dr Richard Searle, Senior Security Architect at Fortanix explains how to take back control.

#Privacy: Keeping sensitive data safe when migrating to the cloud

In just a handful of years, the use of cloud computing has transitioned from being a leading-edge strategy to a standard business practice. The efficiency, agility and reduced overheads created by cloud-based services are swiftly becoming essential if an organisation is to remain profitable and competitive.

Giving Companies the Keys to Controlling Their Data

To bring oversight and control of security back into the business, implement a centralised cloud strategy, encrypt sensitive data across all cloud providers themselves, and manage it in one place.

Extending the “Circle of Trust” with Confidential Computing

The benefits of operational efficiency and flexibility delivered by public cloud resources have encouraged today’s organizations to migrate applications and data to external computing platforms located outside the perceived security of on-premises infrastructures.

Intel® SGX Technology and the Impact of Processor Side-Channel Attacks

Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX) technology provides a trusted execution environment (specifically, a secure “enclave”) for applications to operate in, securing the confidentiality and integrity of both the application and its data while the application is running.

Monitoring Intel® SGX Enclaves

Intel® Software Guard Extensions (SGX) enclaves allow users to execute cryptographically signed code in a protected memory region, safe from kernel-mode, or even SMM-mode, access. Code is attested by the CPU, and can then be remotely verified.

Part 2 - Keeping the Keys to Your Kingdom: Google and Fortanix Collaborate to Deliver “BYOKMS”

On November 20th, Fortanix announced integration between the Fortanix Self-Defending KMS with the Google Cloud External Key Manager (Cloud EKM) service in the session Bringing You More Control: New Services for Data Security and Transparency, featuring a demonstration by joint customer PayPal.

Cloud Security Journey: from Ridiculous to Mainstream to Ridiculous

Early morning today, GCP became the first major cloud provider to give its customers the controls needed to protect their data, even when using the native cloud services such as BigQuery. Google unveiled "External KMS" working with Fortanix and PayPal at Next'19 in London.

Part 1 - Keeping The Keys To Your Kingdom: Google and Fortanix Collaborate to Deliver “BYOKMS”

Today, Fortanix introduced a new feature in the Fortanix Self-Defending KMS to support integration with the Google Cloud’s External Key Manager service, which was announced today at the Google Cloud Next UK conference.

The Fortanix Opportunity to Reshape Data Protection in Cloud-First World

I recently joined Fortanix as VP of Marketing and wrote this blog to share my thoughts on the business opportunity in front of us.

Blockchain: Offload Security Concerns to Fortanix Self-Defending KMS ™

Fortanix Self-Defending KMS is a unified cryptography and key management solution which offers HSM-grade security with software-like scalability, flexibility, and effectiveness. Fortanix has implemented a deterministic HD wallet as an Fortanix Self-Defending KMS plugin which uses the Fortanix Self-Defending KMS native cryptography library.

Why the World is Moving to Hardware-Based Security

You’ve probably heard the phrases "The world runs on software" and "Software is eating the world", which date back to 2010 and 2011 respectively. If it was true back then, it is even more true today. We cannot imagine a world without computers, mobile phones or the Internet. Software is also increasingly prevalent in industrial robots, cars, airplanes, televisions and a plethora of IoT devices around the home.

Trust and Integrity in the Cloud - Manage your secure containers with Fortanix RTE

Container-based software development and deployment has become the next big thing in technology. Container technology, especially Docker, is redefining cloud computing and offers tremendous benefits to companies and developers, including consistency, reliability, efficiency, cost savings, and scalability for the entire DevOps processes.

Confidential Computing: The Early Bird Catches the Worm or, what do you do with Confidential Computing

True to its name, Confidential Computing remained, well – confidential – for a rather long time. Until today, with the public announcement of the Linux Foundation Confidential Computing Consortium.

How to keep your data confidential and mine it too: Private multi-party analytics with Fortanix RTE.

Data-driven decision-making is the norm for businesses of all shapes and sizes, and it is creating a large business opportunity for organizations that are sitting on a massive pile of data.

How Guided User Experience Helps with Easy User Onboarding

User onboarding, simply put is the process of introducing new users to your product. It is a series of interactions or instructions that guides a user to make their product experience easy.

Why are Enclaves Taking Over the Security World

Cloud applications have put trust in the accuracy and security of the code and the cloud infrastructure to ensure their classification and uprightness. But what if, the infrastructure itself is compromised or a hidden gateway in the OS/hypervisor could bargain the application's security or could end up controlling its state. So, what is the solution to it?

In the advent of RSA 2019: How to put the birds back in the cage

As RSA Conference is growing bigger and noisier every year, it’s becoming harder to take a bird’s-eye view of the security space. Still, a few observations can be drawn.

Here comes the RSA 2.0.
Will RSA be 'Better' this year?

This year the RSA Conference is happening March 4th-8th in San Francisco. And, this year’s theme is simply 'Better'. Our young company, Fortanix, will have our first booth, #4518, and we look forward to talking to real Security pros about protecting keys and data regardless of where applications are deployed.

Announcing Fortanix Enclave Development Platform

Since our announcement last year on developing our open source Rust SDK, hundreds of developers have shown interest in this platform. Today, we are excited to announce the launch of Fortanix Enclave Development Platform (EDP). Fortanix Enclave Development Platform (EDP) is the preferred way to write Intel SGX enclaves from scratch.

How to protect your applications on public and private clouds using Fortanix Runtime Encryption®

In this blog we will describe common application threats and how Fortanix Runtime Encryption® protects application assets from these threats on untrusted platforms including public cloud. We will use a 3-tiered application as an example with Nginx as the front-end load balancer tier, Python Flask as the application server tier and MariaDB as the data tier.

Fortanix and IBM Cloud extend cloud security collaboration with new Data Shield powered by Runtime Encryption®

Today, we are taking the next step on our journey to bring Runtime Encryption® to the cloud by announcing the experimental release of IBM Cloud Data Shield.

Never bring a knife to a gunfight!

The Big Hack demonstrates that the cyber warfare has moved from the realm of the software to the realm of the hardware. Software-based security, such as anti-malware, firewall, user behavior analysis, network flow analysis, etc. are ineffective in the face of such sophisticated attacks.

How to Protect Sensitive Data in Virtual Environments

Today, we are excited to announce that Fortanix Self-Defending KMS has achieved VMware Ready status for vSphere and vSAN. The joint VMware and Fortanix Self-Defending KMS solution offers scalable data protection and compliance for software-defined data center and cloud environments.

HSM Security with Cloud Like Economics

I have spent over a decade helping customers derive value from HSMs (Hardware Security Modules). HSM deliver confidentiality for encryption keys in a physically hardened appliance, protecting against insider and external threats.

Why we chose Intel® SGX to power Runtime Encryption

Various security technologies are currently available from vendors such as AMD, Intel, ARM, and Microsoft. How do you choose which one to use? In this post I'll explain the main reasons Fortanix® chose Intel® SGX.

Findings from Fortanix’s RSA Conference Cloud Security Survey

The Fortanix team had a great RSA 2018 Conference. Starting with winning second place on Innovation Sandbox Contests and over the next few days at the Intel booth and Equinix booth, the Fortanix team had great discussions with hundreds of security architects, executives, and partners.

Beyond the Basics: Protect your code and business logic with Runtime Encryption® Plugins

In conversations with customers, we find a strong demand to be able to run sensitive application logic and custom cryptographic schemes inside an HSM-grade trust boundary. To address this demand, Fortanix developed a Runtime Encryption® Plugin capability for Fortanix Self-Defending KMS™ and Equinix SmartKey™, powered by Fortanix.

Why can't HSM and key management be provided to you as a managed service? Or can they?..

For historical reasons and technological barriers traditional HSM and key management did not, and still cannot, be delivered as a managed service. But what if they could be delivered as a secure, easy and simple to consume managed service?

Fortanix will be showcasing Runtime Encryption® at IBM Think

We’re very excited about the conference, which will be our first appearance at IBM Think since announcing our collaboration with IBM Cloud and Intel to bolster trust and security in the cloud.

How to protect Oracle and Microsoft SQL Databases using Fortanix Self-Defending KMS with Transparent Data Encryption

While encryption remains an effective data protection control, it is increasingly difficult to use to protect databases given rapid data growth, clustering of databases and distribution of databases across geographies, across clouds.

Upcoming Intel® SGX Features Explained: Improved Virtualization, Configuration Management, and Key Sharing

In an update to the Intel Software Developer's Manual (SDM), Intel detailed upcoming changes to the Intel® SGX instruction set.

5 Things you need to know about Side Channels and Runtime Encryption® with Intel® SGX

At Fortanix we are building a new class of solutions called Runtime Encryption, leveraging Intel® SGX, to protect applications and data in use. We often receive inquiries about the impact of side channel attacks on Intel® SGX and Fortanix solutions.

How to BYOK to the Cloud using Fortanix Self-Defending KMS

When it comes to the adoption of hybrid or multi-cloud IT, we find in our customer conversations that it's not a question of whether to adopt but rather at what stage of maturity to adopt. To ensure that transition is secure, most customers are rethinking data protection, encryption, and key management controls.

How to encrypt data at rest on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud block storage using Fortanix Self-Defending KMS

One of the challenges to implementing data at rest encryption is the need for robust key management. Solutions dealing with sensitive or high-value data require the use of a hardware security module (HSM).

How to secure legacy applications using format-preserving encryption and tokenization

When retrofitting security onto legacy applications, dealing with the binary blobs you get from standard encryption techniques can be inconvenient.

Secure by design: Rust and Runtime Encryption

At Fortanix, we are big proponents of deterministic security. Designing in security from the get-go by using secure programming principles is a big part of that.

Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities provide important lessons and highlight what’s wrong with the state of security today

Several customers have reached out to Fortanix for feedback on the newly found CPU vulnerabilities.

Fortanix and IBM partner on Runtime Encryption® to bolster Trust in Cloud Computing

Fortanix is pleased to collaborate with IBM to offer an early access of the IBM Cloud Data Guard preview that firmly tips the balance in favor of cloud. IBM Cloud Data Guard offers applications the protection of data in use and is powered by Fortanix’s Runtime Encryption® platform.

Fortanix and Equinix Collaborate to launch Equinix SmartKey™ Beta program

Earlier this year, Fortanix launched a radical new technology based on Intel’s SGX, delivering Runtime Encryption® to protect applications and data in use. Today, we are excited to announce our collaboration with Equinix to launch the Equinix SmartKey™ public beta program, industry’s first HSM-as-a-Service.

On malleability of security software

Apple could have weakened its iPhone security architecture with a simple software update.

Provable defense against cyber breaches: Introducing Fortanix

It’s a big and exciting day for us at Fortanix —  I’m thrilled to announce our series-A financing of over $8M to bring Runtime Encryption™ to enterprises.