In an increasingly connected world, the security and flexibility of systems are crucial challenges. The COGNIFOG platform uses ARCA Trusted OS, an operating system owned by CYSEC, which offers a robust solution for deploying distributed systems, from the cloud to IoT, while ensuring protection against intrusion propagations and data breaches in a transparent manner for the DevOps. This article explores the capabilities of ARCA Trusted OS within the COGNIFOG platform and demonstrates how it integrates with the stack’s components to provide a comprehensive platform for large-scale data management.
ARCA Trusted OS: A Secure OS for Diverse Deployments
ARCA Trusted OS is a hardened operating system (OS) that guarantees strong protection against intrusions and data breaches, whether deployed on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge. Designed to adapt to various hardware types, ARCA Trusted OS can be deployed on X86 servers, small embedded ARM-based boards, and cloud infrastructures.Furthermore, ARCA Trusted OS is designed to only run containerized applications, therefore it includes some of the mainstream container management tools such as Kubernetes, Docker and Podman to enable the easy and secure deployment of applications across different platforms.
COGNIFOG: A Secure Data Processing Platform
COGNIFOG is a platform deployed on distributed architectures, designed to facilitate data collection and processing for various types of applications while enforcing homogeneous security thanks to ARCA Trusted OS. This platform leverages Kubernetes to connect clusters of ARCA Trusted OS nodes deployed in the cloud, at the edge, and on IoT devices, creating a secure and seamless Cloud to Edge Continuum. The COGNIFOG platform integrates dedicated containers for retrieving data from various IoT devices using different protocols. These containers can also embed artificial intelligence algorithms to perform, for example, data preprocessing at the edge, allowing only the most relevant data to be filtered and transmitted to the cloud. This approach reduces data load and improves processing efficiency.
Integration of Cryptographic Capabilities and Advanced Monitoring
One of the strengths of ARCA Trusted OS also lies in its advanced cryptographic capabilities, directly accessible through CONIFOG workloads via ARCA’s Key Management System (KMS). This KMS allows the use of different cryptographic backends, such as OpenSSL, HSMs, TPMs, and post-quantum cryptography cores. This flexibility ensures multi-level protection for different security needs.The implementation of ARCA Trusted OS within the COGNIFOG platform offers a powerful solution for the secure and flexible deployment of distributed systems, from the cloud to the edge. This collaboration not only enables efficient data management but also provides robust protection against security threats, ensuring that critical applications operate in a secure and high-performance environment. Through these technologies, CYSEC demonstrates its ability to support diverse application deployments while maintaining an unparalleled level of security.
Figure : The COGNIFOG high-level architecture :