WD Collaborates With lowRISCn Google and Coalition of Partners in Support of OpenTitan Open-Source Project

Western Digital Corp. (WDC) teamed up with lowRISC, Google LLC and a coalition of partners in support of OpenTitan, an open-source project building transparent, quality reference design and integration guidelines for silicon root of trust (RoT) chips that can be used in storage, compute, and other hardware platforms.

Leveraging the company’s expertise in data infrastructure and open-source technologies,WDC is working with ecosystem partners to optimize the OpenTitan framework to meet the diverse security demands of data-centric storage use cases from the core to the edge, including ML applications, smartphones and connected IoT devices.

Comparison of major design components of traditional RoT and OpenTitan RoT

The OpenTitan project was established with the belief that the ability to understand, inspect and verify a device from the chip to the application is critical in data security. As it’s open, adopters of the OpenTitan framework can review, audit and contribute to OpenTitan’s register-transfer level (RTL) reference design, firmware and integration guidelines. This transparency will help to create more secure RoT solutions and enable continued innovation.

“As the volume and value of data continues to grow exponentially, so does the need to keep that data safe and secure,” said Dr. Richard New, VP, R&D, WDC. “OpenTitan leverages the power and transparency of the open-source development model to enable root of trust chips that can be fully inspected and verified, thereby providing strong security vs. malware, physical hardware modifications and other threats. Our work with the OpenTitan project, and ongoing collaboration with the open-source community and security ecosystem, furthers our commitment to accelerating the development of more secure data infrastructure as we move into the zettabyte era.“

As part of the company’s ongoing participation in the OpenTitan project, the firm is collaborating with lowRISC, Google and others to develop the OpenTitan RoT, including contributing to its initial overall design, hardware block implementation and firmware. WDC’s support of the project further extends the company into open-source innovation, including  investments in the open-source software and hardware ecosystem, participation in open industry standard security groups, and leadership in open-source organizations.

OpenTitan helps to make RoT chips more transparent, trustworthy and secure
A RoT is a function or element in a computing module that is always trusted by the computer’s OS. It serves as the foundational trusted element in a linked chain, in which each element is secured by a prior trusted element. In this way, a RoT can ensure the overall security for multiple constituent elements in a larger complex system.

Key benefits of the OpenTitan RoT include:

• Transparency: Adopters can inspect and contribute to OpenTitan’s design, firmware, and documentation, helping to build more transparent, trustworthy hardware RoT chips that benefit everyone.

• Quality: OpenTitan’s goal is to build and maintain a quality and logically secure RTL design, firmware, and documentation. The project is staffed by expert engineers focused on design validation and technical documentation, all based on key learnings from designing Google’s Titan chips.

• Flexible: Adopters can increase their total addressable market and reduce costs by using a single platform-agnostic hardware RoT design that can be integrated in data center servers, peripherals, and any other hardware platforms.

“Customers are asked to put faith in proprietary hardware RoT chips for their mission-critical systems without the ability to fully understand, inspect and, therefore, trust them,” said Dominic Rizzo, OpenTitan lead, Google Cloud. “By creating OpenTitan with technology leaders like Western Digital and the broader hardware and academic community, we can leverage the experience and security principles used to create Google’s own Titan chips to make hardware RoT designs more transparent, inspectable, and accessible to the rest of the industry. Security should never be built on opacity.“

OpenTitan is managed by lowRISC, an independent not-for-profit engineering organization that uses collaborative engineering to develop and maintain open-source silicon designs and tools.

“At lowRISC, our mission is to establish a vibrant ecosystem around open silicon designs and to help lower the barrier to producing custom chips,” said Gavin Ferris, board member, lowRISC CIC. “The collaboration between lowRISC, Google, WDC and the OpenTitan ecosystem of like-minded organizations focused on the goal of improving transparency around chips helps increase trust in the overall security of the infrastructure on which software runs. With OpenTitan, enterprise organizations and consumers alike will benefit from services built on a more secure infrastructure that is anchored in transparently implemented OpenTitan chips.“

Resources:
Dr. New’s blog: Making Data Infrastructure Safer and More Transparent with OpenTitan
OpenTitan – open sourcing transparent, trustworthy, and secure silicon   
Google Security blog: OpenTitan – open sourcing transparent, trustworthy, and secure silicon
Blog: How Open Innovation Can Free the Data Path     
RISC-V and Open-Source Innovations at Western Digital
From lowRISC: Announcing OpenTitan, the First Transparent Silicon Root of Trust