BedRock HyperVisor™

Active Defense in Depth

As part of the BedRock Zero Trust Design™, the whole BHV™ architecture is built on the paradigm of Active Defense in Depth, assuming that even if one layer of defense is penetrated the next layer would catch the fallout. As an example, even though the BHV™ is being formally verified to establish the Bare Metal Property™ – guaranteeing that no lateral movement of threats via VM escapes is possible – every Virtual Machine or Guest has a dedicated Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) serving as the hardware abstraction layer. Per-guest VMMs enable stronger defense against microarchitecture-based side channel attacks and provide higher information assurance in a multi-tenant world where essential forensic data and telemetries must not be a source of security concerns.

Guest VMs that communicate with each other, can do so through the BedRock Virtual Switch that is part of the formally secure virtualization stack. Active Defense in Depth means that Active Security™ policy will actively constrain the communication to its designed and enforced pattern, actively preventing misbehavior and risky communication.

Standards Based

To enable a smooth transition for brownfield and greenfield approaches to virtualization, adoption of known standards is key. The BedRock Hypervisor™ (BHV™) supports VirtIO for device drivers in guest workloads and has a built-in virtual switch making it easy for network administrators to integrate and manage virtual appliances. This enables customers to transform existing applications – even on existing supported hardware – into a segregated secure by design system, without forcing the operator and designers to adopt to new interfaces or proprietary protocols.

Novel SWaP-C Optimizations

When optimizing Size, Weight, Power and Cost, physical separation is replaced with virtualization. With traditional hypervisor offerings, security is naturally being sacrificed. However, for certain sectors within Government, Enterprise and Defense, security, and sometimes safety, are of paramount concern which means that standard SWaP–C optimizations cannot be utilized. BedRock is becoming a key player in driving down SWaP–C for its customers and partners by enabling them to securely and transparently consolidate their physical assets.

The BedRock HyperVisor™ (BHV™) provides secure virtualization based on the Bare Metal Property™ and even increases the level of possible security by leveraging BedRock Active Security™– which not only eliminates the lateral movement of threats via VM escapes, but also allows to enforce least privilege and least functionality inside the guest, from within the HyperVisor. For example, a user which currently utilizes 3 desktops/workstations in order to segregate a variety of privileged and unprivileged information can transition to a single BedRocked™ workstation, providing clear benefits in terms of Size, Weight, Power and Cost, while also increasing the level of isolation – and thus the security – of the overall system.

Unmodified Guest OS & Applications

The BedRock Hypervisor™ (BHV™) is designed to run unmodified guest operating systems, applications and containers, without the need to recompile the kernel or any application. Powered by formal methods, a fully verified BHV™ cannot be breached, and, therefore, is not part of the attack vector. Furthermore, the fundamental hardware abstraction layer leverages hardware (security) features, enabling them for the upstream OS and application, while concealing them from the OS, increasing system security.

Brownfield and Modernization

Existing legacy applications and appliances have seen huge investment and adoption. With modernization and security driving change, the Bedrocking™ approach allows you to migrate to a new Zero Trust Design™ with minimum effort and risk. The ability to virtualize unmodified workloads enables state of the art security for existing assets. This is key to retaining existing investments and BedRocking™ them without costly – and sometimes impossible – redesign and redevelopment.

Greenfield and Software Defined Architectures

The pressure for lower CAPEX and OPEX, the irreversible move to software-based value propositions, and the need to leverage the scalability of modern standards-based commodity hardware drove many industries to Software Defined Architectures first, and then – if possible – to Cloud Native Architectures. Currently these are the standard in many industries such as Telecom, and they are key drivers for change in others such as Industrial Control and Process. However, these approaches struggle to provide the necessary Functional Safety and Security guarantees. BedRock’s tools-based Formal Verification process is crucial to bringing the foundational guarantees needed for critical infrastructure to the agile world of Software Defined Architecture.

Formal Verification

Formal verification allows us to establish the correctness of a system to the same degree of confidence that you know that 1 + 1 = 2. Rather than trusting that code is correct, we prove it correct; the proof justifies the trust in the code, transferring it into the trust of a much smaller model. 

Constructing these proofs at the scale of modern software is a monumental task. To make this tractable, BedRock Systems is investing in automation to reduce the manual effort required to build and maintain formal proofs. This approach enables software agility without fear of introducing bugs and human error in the process.

Bare Metal Property™

Virtualization stacks which exhibit the Bare Metal Property™ guarantee that every running guest behaves as if it were running on bare metal (i.e. directly on a physical asset). This property means that an action that could not happen on the bare metal device could also not happen running in the virtualized environment. At BedRock, we are developing mathematical proofs which show that the BedRock Hypervisor™ (BHV™) adheres to the Bare Metal Property™ and thus that lateral movement of threats through VM escapes are blocked. 

No Vendor Lock-In

The BedRock Hypervisor includes a business-friendly open source license. This prevents vendor lock-in, provides freedom of choice, and prohibits intellectual property contamination. Rather than create a dependency, BedRock Systems is committed to community-driven projects and collaboration.