Security Means You Never Stop Looking
Dedicated security research experts are always working to make our products more secure.
Fueling Continuous Product Improvement
Attacks are growing more complex, and threats continue to evolve. It’s crucial that you have a way to keep ahead.
From researching known attacks to identifying what’s next, Intel is always looking to break what we build to make our technology even stronger.
What’s Known and What’s Next
Facing relentless security threats, researchers continually monitor and probe Intel technologies with one goal in mind: To figure out what we haven’t thought about previously to get ahead of new attack vectors in the logical and physical attack space.
These research experts conduct in-depth adversarial analysis of technology architecture, focusing on system-level security spanning hardware and software layers, and have dedicated specialists looking at physical and fault injection attacks to resolve vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Their work supports the following areas:
- Intelligence insights: New industry and academia security results
- Architecture review: Assess against security objectives
- Threat model: Continue to align with evolving threats
- Vulnerability & exploitation: Find novel vulnerabilities, develop proof-of-concept exploits
- Systemic mitigations: Looking to eliminate classes of vulnerabilities
Offensive research is driven by the Strategic Threats Offensive Research and Mitigations (STORM), Intel Security Threat Analysis and Reverse Engineering (iSTARE), and Offensive Security Research (OSR) teams. They hold deep experience in logical and physical attacks and run a state-of-the-art lab focusing on fault injection, side channels, reverse engineering, crypto/Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC), and artificial intelligence/machine learning.
Research findings go beyond product quality. Intel follows a closed-loop process and what our researchers learn is continually fed back into future roadmaps as well as shared with industry collaborators.
Check out the Latest from INT31
From exploration of emerging vulnerabilities to innovative mitigation approaches and the latest in AI security, INT31 is leading security research at Intel and with the ecosystem to collectively advance the state of product security.
Countering the Latest Threats
Defensive research efforts focus on developing hardware and software mitigations for new and emerging threats to protect Intel platforms and customer data on our platforms.
Research is driven by today’s threat landscape and the discovery of new vulnerabilities and exploits that require mitigation strategies. Defensive research leads to new mitigation methods, helping improve product resiliency. This work aids the Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) efforts through:
- Developing new features to accelerate mitigations
- Helping triage incoming reports to verify researcher findings and assess risk
- Evaluating the effectiveness of mitigations to measure the robustness of fixes and how well they address root causes
Research also helps in the development of new security capabilities that enable our customers to create new usages. Security technologies that research contributed to include:
- Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX)
- Intel® Control-Flow Enforcement Technology (Intel® CET)
- Intel® Total Memory Encryption (Intel® TME)
Intel® SGX illustrates our commitment to continuous adoption of research learnings, having evolved from a client to cloud solution. Intel SGX has been battle-hardened and our research has strengthened the posture and capabilities to protect user data in the cloud.
Driving a Security-Focused Mindset
Central to research efforts is raising the security acumen and practices of our employees to encourage every architect, developer, designer, and validator to think like a hacker and break what they build, through:
Immersive Mentoring
Company-wide mentoring aims to grow security leaders across disciplines and businesses. These efforts focus on training engineers in how to approach and solve security challenges and how to best balance requirements to make optimal security decisions for our products.
Security Belt Program
This multi-level training program follows industry best practices, creating a formalized process for our employees to develop and demonstrate technical expertise across hardware and software security.
Initial belt levels focus on web-based courses, manager/mentor discussions, and participation in activities designed not only to acquire knowledge but to apply it directly to product development. These include White (awareness), Yellow (learner), and Green (practitioner) belts.
Advanced belt levels require a demonstration of significant security acumen through activities such as presenting, mentoring, publishing, and innovating/enhancing product security. The levels progress from Blue (expert) to Brown (leader), culminating in the Black Belt (visionary) certification recognizing the highest levels of leadership within Intel and externally.
Purple Teaming
Specific security hackathons involve Red teams (ethical hackers looking for product vulnerabilities) working alongside Blue teams (the architects and developers who have built the products defending against potential attacks).
Security Tools
We invest in hardware-automated security verification tooling for more effective testing. Hardware security is a complex, relatively new discipline; as such, well-established security assurance automation solutions aren’t available and design methodologies have not been standardized across the industry.
Intel is pioneering automation and tooling for hardware security, including new security assurance methods. One example: we collaborated with MITRE in the implementation of the first-ever, industry-wide taxonomy standard called Hardware Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE).
Comprehensive Training
Our security training program is designed to strengthen the knowledge and skills needed for employees to appropriately apply security every day in their roles, to facilitate security being part of every engineer's DNA, and to provide a strong career path for those interested in security. To do so, the training program incorporates structured pathways covering SDL practices, tools/processes, role-specific technical security knowledge, and skills , along with mentoring and hands-on experiences.
Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) Enhancements
SDL is always evolving to recognize the changing technology and threat landscape as well as best practices. It also evolves with the security experts at Intel as we adapt the requirements to different products and methodologies.
Examples of Research Focus
- Novel mitigation methodologies for transient execution (side channel) attacks
- CPU microcode security threat research
- Cryptographic hardware mitigations for side channel and fault injection resiliency
- Vulnerability and mitigation research for telemetry leakage
- Trusted Execution Engine security
- Graphics hardware and kernel mode drivers
- Security of AI accelerator solutions
- Thermal and voltage attacks
- Virtualization technology security
- FPGA security
- 5G end-to-end solutions
- System firmware technologies
- Pathfinding and research on hardware security analysis tools
Inside the Lab Where Intel Tries to Hack Its Own Chips
This WIRED article details the importance of research against physical attacks and why iSTARE’s proactive approach to reverse engineering weaknesses is vital to developing the next generation of attacks and defenses.
Chips & Salsa: Episode 13
Jerry and CRob explore the Intel STORM team.
Chips & Salsa: Episode 14
Jerry and CRob dig deeper into Intel SPEAR.
Chips & Salsa: Episode 29
Intel STORM team: Thais Moreira.
Accelerating Innovation Through Academic and Community Outreach
Collaboration with the research community through academic investment and partnerships is critical for fueling new ways of thinking to address current and future security threats.
Our relationships with leading security research institutions allow us to work with top talent across a range of programs, including direct investment in sponsored research, awards and recognition programs, community outreach, and mentorship/internships.
Resilient Architectures and Robust Electronics
Academic researchers from 10 leading universities were selected for this center focused on developing new capabilities to help increase the reliability and security of Intel® hardware and software, including the security of Intel® silicon integrated circuits, with all research being made public to the general semiconductor industry.
Scalable Assurance
This program solicited proposals aimed at enabling product security assurance to be performed with greater effectiveness; increase automation and intelligence of deployed tools to assist users without deep security expertise; and support the “shift left” paradigm that focuses on finding and fixing problems as early as possible within the design life-cycle.
Private AI Collaborative Research Institute
Intel launched this collaborative effort working with nine universities worldwide to advance and develop technologies in privacy and trust for decentralized AI. Research addresses secure, trusted, and decentralized analytics, and edge compute to liberate data from silos, protect privacy and security, and maintain efficiency.
Intel Collaborative Research Institutes - Safe Automated Vehicles
This partnership looks to accelerate the design, prototype, and publication of research, and validate ideas in real-world scenarios. The focus is practical innovations that have potential to enhance security and resilience of real-world systems.
Crypto Frontiers Research Center
A collaboration with world-renowned cryptographers to create cryptography technologies for the next generation of computing and beyond, with a focus on solutions for hardware and software that require more sophisticated security features such as computations over encrypted data, long-term security solutions, and secure data sharing.
Side Channel Academic Program
Proactive security research with institutions worldwide inspired by speculative execution side channel (transient execution attack) vulnerabilities. The program focuses on mitigations, potential attack vectors, and software-based mitigations. Findings have been rolled into current products and are informing future designs.
Rewarding Academic Excellence
Hardware Security Academic Award
This award fosters research into solutions, tools, and methodologies to address fundamental security challenges and enhance the industry’s ability to deliver more secure and trustworthy foundational technologies.
Academic Leadership Award
The award recognizes the significant impact on shaping international cyber security research, particularly in hardware-based security, and transferring knowledge and insights to academic and industrial security community.
Outstanding Researcher Award
Honoring exceptional contributions made through university-sponsored research based on factors such as: fundamental insights, technical difficulty, effective collaboration, and industry relevance.
Rising Stars Faculty Award
Recognizes community members doing exceptional work and facilitates long-term collaborative relationships with senior technical leaders at Intel.
Community Outreach
Hands-on experience in secure development and bug hunting
Investing in thriving, diverse security communities