Baidu’s MesaTEE Makes Smart City Management Trusted and More Secure
Back in September, Dr. Tao Wei, Baidu’s Chief Security Scientist, and Lorie Wigle, Intel’s Software and Services Group Vice President and General Manager of Platform Security, co-announced the launch of MesaTEE, a memory-safe trusted secure computing framework. By combining the enhancement of Baidu’s advanced Hybrid Memory Safety (HMS) model with Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX), MesaTEE enables security sensitive services, like banking, autonomous driving and healthcare, to more securely process data on critical platforms, such as public clouds and blockchains. Ever since then, MesaTEE has attracted many compelling applications. Today at the Baidu World conference, Dr. Wei will introduce one of them — trusted secure smart city management.
As the sizes of cities around the world continue to grow, it is challenging to make city management more efficient. Emerging as one of the major facilitating tools, thousands of Internet of Things (IoT) devices are utilized to collect data and upload to the cloud for big data analysis and AI computing. With privacy implication, securely sending, processing and storing data in the clouds become a main concerning issue. Fortunately, MesaTEE provides a holistic solution to address this issue. Specifically, by leveraging the hardware assisted Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) enabled by Intel SGX, MesaTEE effectively reduces privacy exposure risks of data in the cloud. In addition, it allows users to remotely attest and measure the environment, ensuring that the execution of the deployed service is as expected. More importantly, MesaTEE is equipped with HMS and Non-bypassable Security, making it capable of fending off most exploits*.
MesaTEE provides many unique advantages to smart city management components. It allows them to establish more secure, end-to-end channels between clients and cloud or even across clouds. It supports flexible WebAssembly/Python executions as well as sophisticated big data analysis (e.g. Spark analysis in smart healthcare or smart building) and artificial intelligence (AI) computations (e.g. convolutional neural networks). MesaTEE’s unique security properties, together with its full-fledged functionalities and extraordinary computing performance, turns trusted smart city management into reality.
