Hardware acceleration of anti-virus protection is a trend
In April, the RSA Conference was held in San Francisco , which has recently become one of the world's leading platforms for discussing computer security issues. This year, the main topics of the conference were protection from global threats and the safety of the Internet of things. Suggestions from Intel were also added to the general piggy bank - they seemed interesting enough to us to tell about them, even in the absence of further details.
All proposed technologies involve the use of Intel hardware components to accelerate or implement computer protection algorithms. The first technology is called Threat Detection Technology (TDT) and consists of two parts:
- Accelerated Memory Scanning (AMS) is technology that uses Intel integrated graphics to search for malicious code in memory or storage. Now the resources of the central processor are used for this, which slows down the computer and negatively affects energy consumption. The GPU does a good job with both a simple signature search and more intelligent heuristic algorithms. The load on the graphics core is generally less and more predictable, so checks can be carried out more often and more intensively.
- Intel Advanced Platform Telemetry (IAPT) is a technology that uses low-level telemetry data collected by Intel hardware to detect suspicious activity that could be malicious. Depersonized and generalized telemetry information is analyzed in specialized cloud services using Deep Learning and then the results are transferred to the developers of anti-virus software, for a more effective fight against malware in general and zero-day threats in particular
Finally, the new umbrella brand Intel Security Essentials was introduced , which will combine all the security technologies implemented "in hardware" of Intel Core and Xeon processors, such as: secure boot, cryptography and data protection elements, code execution control, and so on, which will still appear.
Accelerated Memory Scanning technology has been implemented in Intel iGPU since 9th generation, so we can use it starting with Skylake processors. AMS support is already announced in Microsoft Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection. For other technologies, the forecasts are less specific, but one thing is obvious - and the RSA Conference once again emphasized this evidence: it is useless to deal with global threats with local protection measures. Only by overcoming distrust and disunity can we make the digital world safer.
