Chip company Intel is to make a bid to dominate the security market by introducing up to ten hardware primitives into its chip sets and CPUs. Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel's business platform business, said: "We found ourselves talking to IT customers that security is an increasingly important component in a connected environment. Many security methods are ad hoc and incomplete." He said that the different security requirements, mostly implemented in software, boiled down to common primitives that could be incorporated in hardware. Those include random number generation, monotonic counters and digital signatures, he said. He said that the primitives will be built into both chipsets and CPUs and will start to be implemented in 1999. Gelsinger said that hardware provided, for example, a better method of random number generation by using analogue and digital signals from within the PC environment itself. In other news, Gelsinger announced that Intel will cooperate with other industry players to form the digital display working group. This is intended to bring more standardisation and better quality to LCD displays. "This is going to give screen kissing good displays," he said. I'm really excited about this." ®