Dutch Secure Autonomous Cloud

Dutch Secure Autonomous Cloud (DUSAC)

Threats undermine trust in critical aspects of our digital society. It is hard to open a newspaper today without reading about yet another infiltration in industrial and government computing systems. For the Dutch service-oriented economy to become a trusted third party in computation on data and benefit from the booming data exchange economy, investment is needed in a distributed computing infrastructure where security is an integral part of every single aspect of the stack,  and users may run (parts of) their applications at unprecedented assurance levels. Without building the corresponding know-how, we not only make ourselves dependent on software and hardware modules whose operation and design are completely out of our control and governed by Big Tech from the USA and China, but even on foreign expertise to evaluate the security of such modules in the first place.  

The Dutch Secure Autonomous Cloud (DUSAC) is a ‘Trusted Delta Works’ to maintain our service-oriented economy and digital sovereignty. Specifically, DUSAC will minimize the footprint of modules that are out of our control for all security-sensitive operations and build the first secure, autonomous, and scalable distributed computing and data service infrastructure to bring highly trustworthy computing to the edge.

DUSAC aims at supporting a range of security postures corresponding to various business models and risk management to defend against adversaries of varying capabilities. Since different security postures incur different costs, the DUSAC infrastructure allows its users to find the optimal trade-off between security and performance (including availability, scalability, latency, throughput, etc.). DUSAC’s secure computation environment combines crypto, formally verified modules, security engineering and hardware isolation, and also builds general application layers and legal and governance frameworks, all with security as a first-class citizen.

Without DUSAC, the Netherlands is under threat not just from attacks, but also from economic revenue loss due to a brain drain of our own security expertise, a lack of trust by industry to find a safe harbor in the Netherlands, and a missing economic driver of the country as a trusted third party in secure data and computation.

Much like physical mainports, we envision DUSAC as a digital mainport that will fundamentally change our society as a whole by taking away the fear that has accumulated because of cyberattacks, computer viruses, malware, privacy leakage, etc. Our approach is multidisciplinary involving policy and governance and business models that analyse security as a differentiator. DUSAC develops the security and system aspects of the next generation cybersecurity infrastructure and offers them as a national utility.