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After several years in the making and two releases, the National Security Agency is winding down new development of its secure client virtualization framework, the High Assurance Platform (HAP).

At HAP's inception, NSA wanted an integrated, networked framework of virtualization and security technology, but the market had yet to deliver one. So NSA set out to piece together the disparate hardware and software that commercial vendors had already placed on the market. "We saw all of these things," Neil Kittleson, the commercial solutions center's trusted computing portfolio manager, said in an interview. "And we saw the need to create custom policy around it to get them all to work in parallel."

Historically, intelligence agencies have used different computers for working with differing levels of classified data, but HAP allows multiple security levels -- from unclassified to top secret -- to operate on the same machine. HAP is managed by NSA's commercial solutions center, a group focused on engaging industry. The intent of the six-year-old program was to leverage purely commercial technologies, rather than relying on custom code and products designed specifically for government, as was long the norm for the intelligence community.

The HAP program was intended to push both NSA's tech boundaries and the industry's own virtualization and security offerings. This close work with vendors is central to the commercial solutions center's broader mission. For example, the office has an outreach element that has vendors come in and talk about emerging capabilities. "We want to know where they're going, understand that, and help influence development," Mike Lamont, chief of the NSA's network solutions office, said in an interview. Vendors of products being used in the HAP project include IBM, VMware, Wave Systems, and others.

"By developing this proof of concept, we've been able to take what we're doing, weave it together, and prove that it works," Kittleson said. NSA now offers a HAP developer kit, including source code and documentation, to allow organizations and vendors to plan their HAP deployment. HAP-compliant technologies have even made their way into the marketplace, with General Dynamics partnering with Dell in 2008 and HP in 2010 with its Trusted Virtual Environment.

When an organization decides to bring a new computer into the HAP environment, baseline measurements of the device (such as, for example, the BIOS configuration) are taken and stored on a remote attestation server. At boot time, HAP workstations go through a process where certain measurements get stored on the Trusted Platform Module, an embedded security chip that's found on many enterprise PCs these days. Then, upon connecting to a network, the remote attestation server verifies the new measurements against the pre-determined baselines. This remote attestation functionality is based on the open Trusted Network Connect network access control architecture.

HAP uses hardware like Intel TxT to protect memory and execution space, Intel VT-d to isolate I/O devices attached to the computer and operating system, and virtualization tweaks to enforce strict security policies. This prevents exploits like heap or stack-based memory buffer overflows as well as breaches due to direct memory access vulnerabilities and insufficient process isolation.

While many organizations have pieces of HAP's security architecture in place, the integrated security functionality is what, largely even today, makes HAP different from other client virtualization frameworks.

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