Multinational technology giant Intel announced its new technology Intel Authenticate which is designed specifically to curb and foil hackers who use fake email ID’s to lure employees into giving in their usernames and passwords. The authentication system, which will use the multi-factor authentication – a system which uses more than one method to identify a user, will be a part of the company’s sixth generation processors.
Intel Authenticate is also said to allow future corporate IT managers to replace the long and ever-changing passwords with a rather short personal identification number, among other identification procedures that may include biometric identification systems such as the fingerprint system, location of the building the employee is in and other systems such as the proximity of the employee’s mobile or badge etc.
IT managers also have the option to choose the features to be embedded into the chip. Tom Garrison, an Intel Vice President said, “IT has full power”.
Intel will add Authenticate to all the processors that it will sell for all enterprise computers. However, the chips embedded with Authenticate will enter production after being tested by some businesses, Garrison said.
Garrison also reported that an estimated 117,000 corporate cyber-attacks occur every day and involve phishing for the username and password. Phishing is a method used to trick people into revealing their usernames and passwords. The biggest advantage of including Authenticate into the chips is the inherent inclusion of an element of security in the PC. In other words, the PC itself becomes a part of the security system. Industry analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategy supported this by saying:
One of the biggest keys to this is there is a secure element inside the Intel processor that manages all of this. That wasn’t available before. A lot of different pieces had to come together. Hardware is a lot harder to get into.
Even if someone obtained the password, he would be blocked by layers of additional security stashed inside the computer’s processor, he said.
Can Intel Authenticate change the current security scenario?
