RSA Conference News Roundup, Day Two

Chipmaking giant Intel Corp. has unveiled new silicon-level capabilities aimed at helping software vendors identify malware and other hazards more quickly and with less impact on system performance.

Called Threat Detection Technology (TDT), the new offering includes two components. The first, called Accelerated Memory Scanning, is designed to improve processing speed and power efficiency by transferring responsibility for spotting memory-based attacks from the CPU to an integrated GPU. According to Intel, the end result in early benchmarking on test systems has been a drop in security-related CPU utilization from 20 percent to as little as 2 percent.

Early adopters of the new technology include Microsoft, which plans to integrate it into its Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection antivirus solution.

TDT’s second core capability, called Advanced Platform Telemetry, uses machine learning algorithms to search platform telemetry for evidence of advanced threats. Cisco Systems Inc. will use the technology in its Tetration data center security and cloud workload protection solution.

In addition to TDT, Intel also introduced a new framework called Intel Security Essentials today that’s designed to standardize hardware-based security functionality across the company’s Intel Core, Xeon, and Atom platforms.

The new standard will apply specifically to secure boot capabilities; hardware protection for data, keys, and other digital assets; accelerated cryptography; and trusted execution enclaves that protect applications at runtime.