LEVERAGING CONFIDENTIAL COMPUTING TO ENABLE SECURE INFORMATION SHARING

Abstract

The emergence of the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture incentivizes the critical infrastructure protection community to consider the use of emerging open-source security mechanisms to facilitate secure information sharing. An exemplar is Keystone, a Confidential Computing Consortium project, that offers an accessible open-source framework for building trustworthy secure hardware enclaves based on the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture.

This chapter describes an attempt at extending Keystone to the HiFive Unmatched development platform and proposes enclave application development to effectively and affordably supplement deployed supervisory control and data acquisition devices with secure information sharing capabilities. Since the implementation of confidential computing principles axiomatically degrades real-time performance, the performance of supervisory control and data acquisition devices must be characterized to ensure that the devices enhanced with trusted execution environments meet operational requirements while supporting critical infrastructure operations with secure information sharing capabilities.