AMI Contributes its Tektagon OpenEdition Platform Root of Trust Firmware Code Base to the Open Compute Project

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Oct 18, 2022, 12:00 ET

ATLANTA and SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 18, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- AMI^®, a global leader in the Dynamic Firmware market for worldwide computing, today announces its contribution of its Tektagon OpenEdition™ Platform Root of Trust (PRoT) code base to the Open Compute Project^® (OCP^®).

This contribution joins AMI's ongoing contributions of its Aptio OpenEdition™ UEFI Firmware and MegaRAC OpenEdition™ BMC Firmware code bases to OCP. With this contribution, AMI now offers open-source firmware solutions across all three of its core firmware product categories – to power (UEFI), manage (BMC) and secure (PRoT) the world's connected devices with open-source dynamic firmware from AMI.

The Open Compute Project (OCP) represents a global community of technology leaders working together to break open the black box of proprietary IT infrastructure to achieve greater choice, customization, and cost savings. OCP makes these solutions, standards and designs available through its OCP Marketplace, where organizations of all types and sizes can research and learn how to purchase OCP Accepted™ and OCP Inspired™ products.

As an OCP Contributor, AMI is committed to encouraging transparency, reliability and security within the open-source community to drive the industry forward, encourage broader adoption of industry-standard data center solutions and harness a respected platform to provide innovative features back to the community. With these goals in mind, AMI continues to work with leaders in the Open Compute ecosystem such as ASPEED^® Technology – whose AST1060 service processor is the silicon of choice for the Tektagon OpenEdition solution - to address the challenges and needs that are most important to the OCP end-user community.

As part of its commitment to OCP and open-source initiatives, AMI collaborates closely with silicon providers, ODMs and OEMs to provide open firmware solutions based on the most prevalent source trees while it develops additional value-add features for them. In this way, AMI can maintain the base source, offer multiple levels of support options and offer add-ons for advanced features. Additionally, the AMI source trees are fully managed and maintained by AMI with its world class engineer-to-engineer support and ongoing contributions to OCP.

About Tektagon OpenEdition

Tektagon OpenEdition is an open-source Platform Root of Trust (PRoT) solution with foundational firmware security features that detect platform firmware corruption, recover the firmware and protect firmware integrity. With its open-source code, Tektagon OpenEdition™ augments transparency, resulting in high-quality code and improves implementation with greater customizability, extensibility and support for the open-source community – resulting in faster time-to-market. And like its sibling Tektagon™ XFR – AMI's flagship PRoT solution – Tektagon OpenEdition is compliant with the NIST Platform Firmware Resiliency (PFR) Guidelines NIST SP 800-193. It is available today for the open-source community through the Open Compute Project GIT repository at https://github.com/opencomputeproject/Tektagon-OpenEdition.

"Today's announcement is a key milestone for AMI in our open-source firmware strategy. We have reached the 'trifecta' with our open-source firmware offerings and can now offer open-source solutions for everything you need on the platform – to power, manage and secure your mission-critical connected devices," said Zachary Bobroff, Senior Director of Product Office at AMI and a key driver of OCP participation at AMI. "In today's rapidly expanding IT landscape, there is more data, along with more devices and more architectures - thus more vulnerabilities open to exploit and attack. The Open Compute ecosystem is no different in that regard, highlighting the extreme importance for an open-source PRoT solution such as our Tektagon OpenEdition. We are grateful to the OCP team and our partners like ASPEED who have supported and collaborated with us on the journey to reach today's important milestone," he added.

"The Open Compute Project (OCP) Foundation is delighted to see AMI's contribution of Tektagon OpenEdition to the OCP Community today. As threats to firmware integrity and security increase, AMI's participation in building up hardware security layers that enable systems builders to more easily deliver open and secure cloud platforms is exactly what the Community needs - and at the right time. We are grateful and recognize AMI's work and participation in the OCP Community and their resulting contribution to platform security, and their commitment to OCP's mission to deliver open, validated, secure and scalable cloud solutions," said Bijan Nowroozi, CTO from the Open Compute Project Foundation.

He added that "AMI's participation underscores the importance and growing enthusiasm for open-source initiatives at all levels of the scalable computing ecosystem. Adopters of OCP firmware like Tektagon OpenEdition will ultimately benefit by reduced development and validation efforts and resources, both now and into the future. OCP's focus on sustainable lifecycle design extends the lifecycle of their platforms, and this hardware security solution further enhances that approach by providing adopters with the assurance of commonly available, stable, secure and hardened code."

"In order to secure platform firmware, the root of trust must be proven - which requires all firmware to be validated and trusted. We are very pleased that AMI has selected the AST1060 PRoT SoC as the hardware vehicle for Tektagon OpenEdition to deliver this capability in an open-source solution through OCP and applaud AMI on its latest source code contribution to the Project. The AST1060 is NIST SP 800-193 compliant as a platform firmware resilience (PFR) solution and features a high-performance Arm® Cortex® M4 CPU (200MHz) to significantly enhance the efficiency of secure image verification to make it a perfect choice for AMI. The internal flash and SRAM architecture of the AST1060 brings the utmost security protection to devices and provides an economical, efficient and powerful silicon platform for the Tektagon OpenEdition firmware," said Chris Lin, Chairman and President of ASPEED.

For more information about the Tektagon OpenEdition code base components from AMI and the benefits of leveraging open-source firmware code from AMI, please visit ami.com/open-source. To review the specifications and key features of the solution, download the Tektagon OpenEdition datasheet at https://9443417.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/9443417/Data_Sheets/Security_Solutions/Tektagon_OpenEdition_Data_Sheet_PUB.pdf.

The OCP and OPEN COMPUTE PROJECT marks are owned by and used with the permission of the Open Compute Project Foundation. GITHUB^®, the GITHUB^® logo design, OCTOCAT^® and the OCTOCAT^® logo design are exclusive trademarks registered in the United States by GitHub, Inc. ASPEED^® is a registered trademark of ASPEED Technology Inc. Arm^® and Cortex^® are registered trademarks of Arm Limited (or its subsidiaries) in the US and/or elsewhere. Intel^® is a registered trademark of Intel Corporation. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the respective property of their owners.

About AMI

AMI is Firmware Reimagined for modern computing. As a global leader in Dynamic Firmware for security, orchestration and manageability solutions, AMI enables the world's compute platforms from on-premises to the cloud to the edge. AMI's industry-leading foundational technology and unwavering customer support have generated lasting partnerships and spurred innovation for some of the most prominent brands in the high-tech industry. AMI is also a critical provider to the Open Compute ecosystem and is a member of numerous industry associations and standards groups, such as the Unified EFI Forum (UEFI), PICMG, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), National Cybersecurity Excellence Partnership (NCEP), and the Trusted Computing Group (TCG).

SOURCE AMI