Intel Security Execs Outline Efforts to Address Top Cybersecurity Challenges

Intel security leaders on Thursday outlined many of the areas in which the company and its partners are safeguarding data from increasingly aggressive cybercriminals.

The Intel security execs gathered for a fireside chat on cyber leadership. They discussed how security rooted in hardware is solving the biggest cybersecurity challenges. That includes improving software resilience and protecting health care data, to improving supply chain security.

Amy Santoni is principal engineer in Intel‘s security architecture and engineering group. One thing Intel’s been working on with partners is federated learning, she said.. That allows organizations to share data so that they can learn from each other without disrupting privacy or giving access to full databases of information. They’re able to control which data they see and the privacy aspects of data they share.

This is especially helpful with medical research, she said.

Intel’s Amy Santoni

“This is really exciting when we look at … sharing information where, due to regulation they can’t just openly share, but sharing the right information to do things that are good for society and good for the world, yet still preserving their privacy and individual information that you don’t want to share across tons and tons of organizations,” Santoni said.

Confidential Computing

Ron Perez is fellow of security architecture in Intel’s data platform group. He said Intel is a firm believer in the promise of confidential computing. That’s cloud computing technology that isolates sensitive data in a protected CPU enclave during processing

Perez said confidential computing is interesting to many partners — and also some of Intel’s competitors.

Intel’s Ron Perez

“That’s why we’ve co-founded the Confidential Computing Consortium with the help with the Linux Foundation,” he said. “And we welcome everyone’s participation in this very worthy endeavor. We’re doing some amazing things with these partners … many of which were not even possible without this technology in the health sciences space, which is one example.”

Tom Garrison is Intel‘s vice president and general manager of client security strategy and initiatives. He said Intel partners with the “best minds” in the industry to find vulnerabilities in its platforms. Those partners include academia and other security-based companies.

Intel’s Tom Garrison

“And we have a bug bounty program where we pay people to do that,” he said. “In fact, last year we paid out about $800,000 toward that. And the result was 92% of all the security vulnerabilities that were discovered last year were as a result of either our own internal offensive researchers or through partnership, our company and through our bug bounty program. The most important element of that is none of those exploits we believe were ever exploited in the wild. So we are out on the forefront with finding issues and mitigating them before they’re ever exploited.”