A New Security Partnership: Symantec and Intel

Computer security is one of the most dynamic areas of the entire IT industry, an area where two factions do battle: on the one hand, there are security software solutions like firewalls, antivirus programs and so on; and on the other hand, we have computer viruses, Internet based attacks, spyware and various other malware programs.

Well, it looks like the good guys are going to get some more help from the underlying computer hardware, at least in the case of computers sporting one of the new microprocessors that integrate a number of security features and policies. These security processors are now being developed in a joint effort by Symantec and Intel, according to Symantec's Vice President Rowan Trollope, who was cited by the news agency Reuters.

The joint development effort, named Project Hood, makes use of the virtualization technology that both companies seek to expand and improve and the whole project is centered on the use of software applications in order to replicate entire computer systems. Intel computer processors from the newer generations are already incorporating some sort of virtualization support at a low hardware level.

While security software solutions are around from "ancient" times, the novelty of this approach is that instead of running on top of an operation system like Microsoft's Windows or a Linux distribution, the new security applications will directly interact with the hardware layer, in this particular case, Intel made chips. "It runs underneath and alongside the operating system," Rowan Trollope said.

According to Symantec's Vice President, the evolving security products, as well as their hardware layers, will be used on the next generation of servers and business computer systems that need a high level of security and in time they may even be affordable to the consumer computer market.