By Steve Wei, Sr. Director, Software Engineering

Supply chain practices begin with trusting the source, however, screening processes that discover counterfeit components are limited – especially for products with a variety of subsystems. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for companies to unwittingly purchase counterfeit IT equipment, allowing it to infiltrate their data centers.

With growing concern over counterfeit electronic parts and the threat they pose to safety and business critical applications, here at Hyve, we’ve joined Intel’s Transparent Supply Chain (TSC) program.

The Intel TSC program is a set of policies and procedures implemented at ODM factories, enabling end-users to validate where and when every component of a platform was manufactured.

TSC targets to resolve challenges across supply chain from the component to the system-level which include obtaining visibility into server details and business fleet, trace and verify provenance of systems and components, and improve quality assurance for servers and business PCs. This allows not only us but our customers to have access to a fully audited and validated supply chain; keeping the concern of counterfeit electronic parts and possibilities of data center infiltration in mind. The thesis of TSC is as follows, “The benefit of the Transparent Supply Chain it that it allows the system integrator and all the way to the end user the ability to audit and validate the authorized supply chain.” ¹

Hyve uses Intel TSC as a tool to collect system-level information and TPM Certificates to upload to a secure FTP server; alongside component-level information from vendors (i.e. drive or motherboard). Intel then checks and signs for fingerprint files and posts this information on the Web server. The end customer can then search and download requested files as well as signed certificates from the portal.

TSC allows for Hyve to catch any unusual changes within a component or system before it reaches our customers. By doing so, we protect our customers from potential threats and that process starts from within the supply chain.

To learn more about Intel’s TSC program and how they strive to keep supply chain secure, click here.

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¹ https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/white-papers/transparent-supply-chain-paper.pdf