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Project Cerberus

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Cerberus is a NIST 800-193 compliant hardware root-of-trust with an identity that cannot be cloned. Cerberus is designed to further raise the security posture of Azure infrastructure by providing a strong anchor of trust for firmware integrity.

Enabling an anchor of trust

Every Cerberus chip has a unique cryptographic identity that is established using a signed certificate chain rooted to a Microsoft certificate authority (CA). Measurements obtained from Cerberus can be used to validate integrity of components such as:

  • Host
  • Baseboard Management Controller (BMC)
  • All peripherals, including network interface card and system-on-a-chip (SoC)

This anchor of trust helps defend platform firmware from:

  • Compromised firmware binaries running on the platform
  • Malware and hackers that exploit bugs in the operating system, application, or hypervisor
  • Certain types of supply chain attacks (manufacturing, assembly, transit)
  • Malicious insiders with administrative privileges or access to hardware

Cerberus attestation

Cerberus authenticates firmware integrity for server components using a Platform Firmware Manifest (PFM). PFM defines a list of authorized firmware versions and provides a platform measurement to the Azure Host Attestation Service. The Host Attestation Service validates the measurements and makes a determination to only allow trusted hosts to join the Azure fleet and host customer workloads.

In conjunction with the Host Attestation Service, Cerberus’ capabilities enhance and promote a highly secure Azure production infrastructure.

Note

To learn more, see the Project Cerberus information on GitHub.

Next steps

To learn more about what we do to drive platform integrity and security, see: