WinMagic to Support Intel AES-NI and Anti Theft Technology V3.0

WinMagic Inc. announced that its SecureDoc FDE solution will support Intel Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (AES-NI) and Intel Anti Theft Technology v3.0 in future releases of SecureDoc.

Available on the new Intel Xenon processor 5600 series, AES-NI consists of a set of instructions that provide hardware support for AES which increases the efficiency and performance of the CPU to enable significantly-faster and more-secure encryption/decryption compared to pure software implementations. Intel Anti Theft Technology v3.0 will allow SecureDoc in future releases to deliver a ‘poison pill’ over a 3G connection to ensure stolen/lost laptops can be disabled even when they are not connected to a LAN or the Internet.

"WinMagic worked with Intel’s SSD group to test SecureDoc FDE software, which was modified to utilize the AES-NI instructions, on Intel’s SSD drive," said Thi Nguyen-Huu, CEO and President of WinMagic Inc. "We were extremely impressed with the performance improvement over software encryption alone – which was about 50 percent faster on Intel’s fast SSD with AES-NI compared to normal software encryption," Nguyen-Huu continued. "The improved performance coupled with the expectation that SSDs will soon be incorporated in most laptops, was enough to convince us to add full support for AES-NI to future releases of SecureDoc."

WinMagic also demonstrated how SecureDoc makes it simple for organizations to take full advantage of Intel Anti-Theft Technology (Intel AT) at IDF 2010 in San Francisco. Available in select systems with the Intel Core processor family, Intel AT acts as a laptop theft deterrence mechanism – enabling organizations to remotely issue a ‘poison pill’ to disable stolen laptops via internet connections or through select 3G wireless modems. SecureDoc seamlessly adds full-disk encryption and encryption management to Intel AT – ensuring data cannot be accessed when a laptop is disabled, even if the hard drive is removed and installed on another computer.

Taking advantage of the new hardware-based intelligence of Intel AT 3.0, shortly after a missing PC is turned on, and before the operating system is even loaded, the PC can be disabled and the access to data completely blocked. When found, the PC can be quickly reactivated via encrypted SMS messages. This robust solution combines the strengths of hardware and software from the two companies and will help organizations improve the protection of sensitive data.

"The ongoing collaboration with WinMagic on data protection and PC theft deterrence has generated very fruitful results that will benefit our mutual customers," said George Thangadurai, General Manager, PC Client Services, Intel Corp. "With the future integration of Intel Anti-Theft Technology version 3.0 capabilities, such as deactivation and reactivation over via select 3G modules, into SecureDoc, businesses will be able to react very quickly when a PC is lost or stolen."