Intel's biggest ever buy is going ahead
EC approves $7.7bn deal, but with conditions
The European Commission has approved Intel's buyout of McAfee – as long as the chip giant allows other companies access to its technology.
One of the Commission's concerns was that Intel, by embedding security on its chips, would effectively exclude competitors' products from the market.
Intel has promised to make interoperability information available to rival firms. It has also pledged to ensure that McAfee's products work just as well on other chips, such as those from AMD.
The Commission said it was worried Intel would either make it difficult for other security products to work on Intel chips or technically tie McAfee products with sales of its own chips.
Intel has promised to make all chip information available so security vendors can make their products work with the processors in exactly the same way as Intel chips work with McAfee software. The Commission will appoint a trustee to monitor the takeover.
Pat Clawson, CEO of security firm Lumension, said: “Intel’s pledge to the EU Competition Commissioner that it will provide rival security firms with access to the necessary information to allow their products to use Intel's chips is reflective of one market reservation over this acquisition. Another and probably more pressing concern is whether it is socially acceptable for Intel to impose security on the device. Whilst it might make sense in the consumer mobility space, governments and enterprises will surely want to make their own security decisions, not have it forced on them at the chip level.
“To date, Intel’s intent and vision behind the deal has been muddy at best. Justin Rattner’s indication that Intel is developing functionality that will prevent zero-day threats on the device is interesting. But the feasibility needs to be explored..."
Rattner said yesterday that Intel is working on hardware-based security to beat "zero-day attacks" – the Holy Grail of the security industry.
Most security products (anti-virus or intrusion detection) use a mixture of signature-based detection, generic detection of variants of known attacks, and behaviour-blocking. Cloud based architectures can help streamline the process of responding to attacks but Intel is talking about something more ambitious, blocking previously unknown attacks.
The Commission said it had worked closely with the US Federal Trade Commission on the investigation.
COMMENTS
Dear God,
Please make it happen that someone has the sense to ensure, from this day and ever after, until the day of final judgment, that it will always be at least theoretically possible to completely exorcise the hell-spawn that is McAfee, and its spawn in turn, from the swollen belly of Intel. Please please please.
Thank you.
Why?
So Intel is just creating a 'rom' chip of anti-virus software instead of a floppy version. It's non-adaptive and a waste of silicon, unless they're creating the circuits to run anti-virus software more efficiently, in which case, there's still no point to it.
less layers are a good thing then eh ?
be interesting to see what they put on the chip that can achieve much.
or will it be too much ? ? ?
It won't work
I can't see how this can stop all malware, so even if it stops say 90% of malware, all that will happen is the malware writers will adapt to use the methods in the 10% that get past Intel. So by the following year, Intel will be stopping the minority of malware.
All Intel will end up doing is creating a pressure for change away from methods of malware writing that are stopped by Intel, towards methods of malware writing that get past Intel's latest marketing gimmick.
My question is -
if Intel bundles McAfee's «security ware» with its chips, does this mean that Intel chips will be platform dependent, with one set of chips for MS, one for Linux distros, one for Mac, etc ? Artifex emptor ?...
Henri
