Nvidia jumps into Zero Trust

Nvidia has announced a Zero Trust platform built around its BlueField data-processing units and Nvidia software.

Zero Trust is an architecture that verifies every user and device that tries to access the network and enforces strict access control and identity management that limits authorized users to accessing only those resources they need to do their jobs.

“You cannot just rely on the firewall on the outside, you have to assume that any application or any user inside your data center is a bad actor,” said Manuvir Das, head of enterprise computing at Nvidia. “Zero Trust basically just refers to the fact that you can’t trust any application or user because there are bad actors.”

Nvidia announced a Zero Trust platform that combines its BlueField data processing units (DPU), which it inherited from the Mellanox acquisition, the DOCA software development kits for BlueField, and Nvidia’s Morpheus security AI framework.

The DPUs are designed to offload tasks from server CPUs, freeing up the CPUs to do processing work. The DPU can handle tasks such as validating users and isolating apps from infrastructure.

DOCA is the SDK to program DPUs to do all those things, while Morpheus is an open application framework for developing AI-optimized pipelines for filtering, processing, and classifying large volumes of data in real time. DOCA and Morpheus work in conjunction for Zero Trust networks.

Nvidia is updating DOCA to version 1.2 to support features such as software and hardware authentication, hardware-accelerated line-rate data cryptography, support for distributed firewalls, and policy enforcement.

DOCA monitors data to set a normal-traffic baseline in order to spot anomalies that might represent attempted attacks. “So it can learn and build the models of what is good behavior. And then anytime it sees a deviation from that, then it gets flagged as problematic,” Das said.

However, “It is not our intention to be a direct provider of cybersecurity solutions. That’s not what we do,” he said. “We have built the platform for cybersecurity companies to integrate into their solutions.”

Juniper Networks is the first cybersecurity vendor to announce it plans to adopt BlueField and DOCA.

Early access for NVIDIA DOCA 1.2 begins Nov. 30. Morpheus is available now.