Intel Corp. today announced it’s opening up its “Project Amber” pilot program and already has two companies signed up: professional services firm Leidos Holdings Inc. and consulting giant Accenture plc.

Project Amber was announced in May and provides organizations with remote verification of trustworthiness in cloud, edge and on-premises environments. Designed to address growing security needs, the service focuses on trust and operates as an independent trust authority in the form of an innovative service-based security implementation code.

In the proof-of-concept pilot with Leidos, a company with a $13.7 billion market cap and 44,000 employees, the company built an attestation service for potential use in its QTC Mobile Medical Clinics. The service uses large, specially equipped vans to perform “in-the-field” medical exams and health information processing for U.S. veterans in rural and underserved areas. Leidos is looking at using Project Amber to play a role in meeting security challenges, including those caused by “internet of things” and medical IoT connected devices.

In the pilot, Leidos’ Health Group used Project Amber Attestation and Intel Software Guard Extensions to create an independently verified hardware root of trust and a trusted distributed compute foundation. The capabilities are designed to protect connected clinical workloads and data in storage, in process and in transmission.

Accenture has integrated Project Amber into a new AI-based framework for privacy-protecting data cooperatives. Well-designed cooperatives are said to let companies share data and collaborate and help reduce concerns around trust, compliance, privacy and data control or ownership.

The Accenture proof-of-concept allows healthcare institutions to expand their knowledge by privately and more securely sharing data and an AI model for disease detection and prevention training from multiple sources.

In earlier testing, Accenture also worked with Intel to demonstrate federated data learning for a practical use case, detecting sepsis. After evaluating different techniques, Accenture chose Intel SGX secure enclave technology to train and use AI models. The POC is a prototyped extension of Accenture Applied Intelligence’s AIP+ service, a collection of modular, pre-integrated AI services and capabilities designed to simplify the adoption of AI solutions.

For the broader service expansion, further pilots of Project Amber begin in the fourth quarter. General availability, including support for cloud software-as-service and edge SaaS licensing, is expected in the first half of 2023.

Photo: TJflex2/Flickr