After nearly a decade, Microsoft's vision for how to protect especially sensitive information within Windows remains largely that--a vision.
For years, the software giant has promised to deliver a secure way to shuttle around key bits of information. Once known as Palladium and more recently dubbed the Next Generation Secure Computing Base, or NGSCB, the approach was once a key part of Longhorn, the next version of Windows. Although the first piece of that is arriving in Longhorn, it's only a thin sliver of what Microsoft has been working toward since describing its idea of "trusted Windows" a decade ago.
In the next version of Windows, which Microsoft chairman Bill Gates will show off on Monday at a company sponsored conference, Microsoft will use the concepts of NGSCB to ensure that Windows-based machines start up without interference. The primary benefit of such an approach is that if a laptop is lost or stolen, the data can't be accessed simply by booting the machine up using another operating system.
|