Intel is building quadruple authentication into its next enterprise chips

Intel Authenticate, is a technology announced recently, which will be integral part of the next generation Intel chips designed to power the next generation PCs for enterprise customers. The new chips will harbor as many as four built-in secure authentication methods, making the upcoming CPUs the first with built-in hardware-based four-factor authentication.

What makes this technology more secure is the difference in how Authenticate handles secure data, in comparison with other systems. While conventional systems use the host PC’s hard drive to store login information, Authenticate stores fingerprints, passwords, facial recognition data, iris scans, and any other piece of information necessary to log users inside a system, within protected areas of the CPU itself.

“No technology is unbreakable…But this takes security to a whole new level” said Technalysis Research analyst Bob O’Donnell, commenting on the fact that by keeping login information like passwords and other data away from the local hard drive, it’s much more difficult for attackers to gain access to systems, in which they would have to develop new ways to communicate directly with the CPU, in order to gain access to authentication information.

Authenticate will work by default with Microsoft Windows 10’s own Windows Hello security layer, with the option of requiring users to go through multiple steps, in order to login. These include facial recognition, fingerprint scans, iris identification, voice recognition, and a touchscreen PIN, among some methods.

In most cases, users are conned into giving up their passwords, simply by visiting certain websites, by opening an unknown email attachment, or by installing unidentified software from an unknown origin, masked as a legitimate application. While there may be very little one can do to curb the latter, aside from purchasing a strong antivirus, keeping suspicious websites from running code from a web browser, in order to steal login information and other data is harder when the data is not located on any readable medium directly accessible through the operating system, such as in the case of Intel’s Authenticate, which stored login information inside the CPU.