In collaboration with the Technical University of Darmstadt and Offenburg University of Applied Sciences, CloudProtect was initiated in summer 2018 to develop new methods for protecting software, digital artifacts and other intellectual property in increasingly networked and automated commerce and industry. With extensive funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and intensive research work, a demonstrator was developed to show how the common cloud infrastructure can be supported by sophisticated and practical security technology - with the security, scalability and availability that the modern economy expects.

In the digital future that was envisioned at the start of the project, and which became a reality much sooner than expected for many businesses and governments around the world due to the pandemic in 2020, software and data have become more mobile and ephemeral than ever before. Office workers took the opportunity to work from home. Disrupted supply chains not only caused empty supermarket shelves, but also caused a rethink of traditional ways of production and logistics, accelerating automation and the use of smart solutions in industry. Companies that had already exploited the potential of the cloud and internet-based business models had a clear advantage over their competitors with only brick-and-mortar stores.

Protecting digital data has become a major challenge as it has become the backbone of today's economy: Machine operating systems, configuration data, designs, confidential business data and many more. This data can be protected using encryption, but there are a number of practical challenges. For example, the necessary cryptographic operations must take place in secure environments, the required keys must be stored and handled securely and the entire infrastructure must be set up in such a way that every actor and device involved in the process is guaranteed to be trustworthy.

In the CloudProtect project, the developers at Wibu-Systems and their research partners in the teams at Darmstadt Technical University, led by Professor Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, and Offenburg University of Applied Sciences, led by Professor Andreas Schaad, have decided to tackle these challenges with a technical trick: In so-called enclaves, which are specially protected storage areas in the cloud, security-critical functionality is securely handled separately from the actual software execution. The SGX enclave technology from Intel was selected after its security level was increased using a special cache randomization technique developed by the research partners to ward off certain side-channel attacks.

Wibu-Systems, as an industry partner and expert in IT security and encryption in the project, brought the teams' results together and created a fully-fledged and functional software protection demonstrator for the cloud. The demonstrator was completed on schedule in July 2021 and meets the requirements set. It provides tamper-proof software protection capabilities for the unpredictable and short-lived world of today's digital economy in a highly available, highly scalable and extremely secure package. The technologies underpinning the CloudProtect project and Wibu-Systems' encryption-based software protection solutions provide the foundation for a secure and trusted future where working from home, smart manufacturing and commerce via the cloud are the norm.

Dr. Carmen Kempka, Director Corporate Technology at Wibu-Systems, sees the big picture: "In practice, our working lives offer much greater freedom of choice: we work from any workplace - from home, in the office, on business trips or anywhere in the world. Applications are outsourced to the cloud so that they can be used from any location and device. With CloudProtect, we have developed a model that provides the necessary security."