Building A Secure Foundation and Secure Supply Chain for Deploying Zero Trust Capabilities and Stopping Exploits at the Edge

To address the Air Force’s need for improved cyber resiliency and zero trust architectures in edge computing environments, Mainsail Industries will adapt Metalvisor, its commercially proven Type 0 hypervisor. This Phase II SBIR effort will focus on developing APIs to extract hardware-level data, enabling comprehensive dashboards for supply chain verification and establishing a hardware root of trust. Metalvisor's unique CPU-level micro-segmentation and proactive threat detection capabilities will be enhanced to mitigate sophisticated attacks like side-channel exploits and zero-day vulnerabilities, ensuring data and mission integrity.Rigorous testing using representative DAF workloads will validate Metalvisor's effectiveness, incorporating it with existing Zero Trust capabilities to address a large portion of the DoD's target and advanced activities. Comprehensive documentation will be generated to support RMF assessments and ATO processes.This project will deliver a prototype common compute base that is secure, performant, and cost-effective, empowering the DAF to rapidly deploy agile and resilient systems in contested environments.