As the Intel Developer Forum commences we finally learn a little bit about what Intel is attempting to do with the acquisition of McAfee among other tidbits. Malware is one of the banes of computing existence. Information is valuable, security is hard, and most people do not know either. Antimalware software remains a line of defense between you and infections in the event that your first three lines of defense (patching known security vulnerabilities in software; limiting inbound connections and permissions; and common sense) fail to help. While no antimalware software is anywhere near perfect Intel believes that getting protection a little deeper in the hardware will do a little more to prevent previously unknown exploits.

Great Norton’s Ghost!

According to McAfee’s website, DeepSAFE is a platform for security software to see more of what is going on in the hardware around the Operating System itself. They are being very cagey about what technology is being utilized both on their site as well as their FAQ (pdf) which causes two problems: firstly, we do not know exactly what processors support or will support DeepSAFE; secondly, we do not know exactly what is being done. While this is more details than we knew previously there are still more than enough holes to fill before we know what this technology truly is capable of.