Intel claims enhanced hardware security in vPro rollout

Stan Beer
Saturday, 09 September 2006 08:49

Your IT - Home IT

The last of Intel's platform based chipsets, vPro for business, has hit the market with the chipmaker emphasising that the platform adds a layer of security in firmware, lessening the impact of Windows malware attacks which disable software security systems.

The key to the vPro chipset, according to Intel, is its active management technology. The new chipset enables enhanced security features to be built in firmware and allowing remote control of machines on a network, independent of the operating system and regardless of whether they're powered up or not.

The vPro platform incorporates the Core Duo dual-core 64-bit processor, Q965 Express chipset and 82566 DC Gigabit Ethernet Controller.

Brett Hannath, Intel regional solutions manager, Customer Solutions Group, claims vPro is the next generation desktop for business.

"In a nutshell, it is a Core 2 Duo processor plus a specific chipset, which contains advanced management technology, virtualization technology and software that we ourselves and some of our partners have written," says Hannath. "A hardware vendor can only put a vPro sticker on the front of a computer if it contains all of those pieces."

The question for most users, who are not interested in jargon, is what can a computer built on the vPro platform deliver that their current system cannot.

According to Hannath, the key things, aside from the performance and power advantages of the Core 2 Duo, will be enhanced hardware level security and remote management of PCs on networks.

"Software and virus protection environments exist but they are vulnerable because they all rely on the client OS being up and running and of entire integrity," says Hannath. "So what we have done is introduce layers underneath the OS, so even if a PC is turned off on a network, we can wake it up. Even if the OS is sitting in a blue screen mode or a virus is out of control and has shut down the keyboard or shut down the ability for the user to interact with the thing, this management environment is still running because it is separate to the OS.

"This is where virtualization comes into play. You can have a user virtual machine where the client OS is running. And you can have all your management infrastructure managing the health of a PC running in another partition. Also now you can remote console into the PC without Windows being started. You can actually watch the machine boot in front of you because this active management technology sits inside a chipset and is not reliant on the client OS being installed or running."

Intel maintains that vPro security and virtualization features are complementary to the software sceurity and virtualization products in the marketplace.

"Take Symantec for example. They have their virus scan console that sits there running on the client PC. We allocate a certain amount of space inside our management partition for them to create a small piece of code that runs below the client OS. So now if someone turns off that virus scan console their Symantec stuff running in our firmware can actually see that the user has turned it off and turn it back on. We're actually providing more capability to the management console people and the virus protection software developers to create a more robust environment."
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