Microsoft moved its open hardware security initiative forward at this year’s Open Compute Project (OCP) Virtual Summit.

At last year’s event, Microsoft introduced Project Cerberus, which it said provides the “missing piece” — security — of its open hardware initiative, Project Olympus. That was the project the company contributed to the open source community in October 2016. Project Cerberus addresses protection, detection, and recovery from attacks on platform firmware. Other companies including Intel, AMD, Broadcom, Nuvoton, Mellanox, and NXP worked with Microsoft and contributed to the project.

At this week's OCP Summit, Microsoft contributed Project Cerberus source code and tools, including system processes, platform architecture, reference architecture, and firmware source to OCP. “We’re looking forward to Project Cerberus-enlightened products coming to the market in 2020,” wrote Kushagra Vaid, distinguished engineer at Microsoft Azure, in a blog post. Vaid is also a newly appointed OCP Foundation board member.

In addition to the hardware security project, Microsoft introduced other data center hardware initiatives at this year’s event and said it plans to contribute source code and specs to OCP in the future. This includes the Datacenter-ready Secure Control Module (DC-SCM) and its DC-SCI interface. DC-SCM is the “heart of the motherboard,” according to Microsoft, and it includes everything on a server motherboard except for the CPU, memory slots, and IO slots.

“The DC-SCI offers a standard demarcation point for DC-SCM to allow AMD-, Intel-, and ARM64-based servers to quickly and easily be built ready for OCP partner companies,” Vaid wrote. Microsoft is “looking forward” to contributing the DC-SCM/DC-SCI base specification to OCP and several original design manufactures are working to integrate DC-SCM into their servers.

Microsoft this week also saw the Linux-based Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) project it donated to OCP gain a handful of new contributors.