The Hindu Business Line : Intel takes on viruses

CHIP major Intel has spelt out the outlines of its plan to enable devices to monitor network traffic intelligently and make PCs infected with worms or viruses place themselves in quarantine.

In a presentation at the recent Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Mr Justin Rattner, Director of Intel's corporate technology group, and Mr Dylan Larson, who runs Intel's network security initiative, elaborated on the company's Automatic Network Outbreak Containment project, formerly dubbed Circuit Breaker, and said the company was developing silicon technology to compliment security software.

Automatic Network Outbreak Containment will basically work through a silicon manageability engine enabled to track the integrity of a software agent and analyse a network's connections per second. If a problem, such as a worm, is encountered, the infected computer will automatically be isolated from the rest of the network, to minimise the infection rate.

A worm can spread to over 1,000 machines in just five minutes on a network.

Intel's technology is different from existing anti-virus initiatives - it is not based on virus signatures.

According to Mr Rattner, the Intel software examines changes in traffic pattern behaviour. "It doesn't have anything to do with how the virus was coded. It also does a good job avoiding false positives. If your system was disconnected from the network because of a suspected virus on a regular basis, you would be very unhappy."

"Worms and viruses have very distinct packet behaviour... that very low-level packet traffic behaviour is what is being tracked."

He said that, in more than 8,000 hours of tests, the technology detected all known, as well as synthetic worms that Intel created, without any false positives.

Mr Rattner added punch to his presentation by having with him a jug of mealworms during an onstage test and assuring the demonstration assistant that he would eat a live worm for every computer worm that escaped in the course of the demo. As it turned out, he did not have to eat a single worm.

Mr David Tennenhouse, Vice-President and Director of Intel Research, said the company was increasingly focusing its research on "proactive computing" - the creation of embedded mini-computers that obtain sensory data from the physical world and move it across it across networks.

Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS), which are very small computers with self-aware networking and, in many cases, independent storage capabilities, will be at the core of networks and will enable computers anticipate and act in advance on the needs of users.

MEMS do not constitute blue-sky technology. They are already in use in anti-lock brakes and air bags.

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