After being introduced at IDF in Fall 2002 with sparse details, Intel finally disclosed a fair amount of technical information regarding its upcoming LaGrande safe computing initiative. LaGrande defines hardware and chipset modifications required to support secure computing environments such as Microsoft's Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB) formerly known as Palladium (check out www.microsoft.com/ngscb). A few months ago at the WinHEC trade show, Microsoft released in-depth information regarding NGSCB (pronounced ing-scub), and we still owe you a deep explorative. In this story, I'll provide a quick review of the need for secure computing (though it is quite obvious), and delve into key functional aspects of both NGSCB and LaGrande, with emphasis on LaGrande-specific components.

It clear we live in a hacker's world. Legions of hackers seem to have little else to do with their time than harass the rest of us, sometimes for kicks, sometimes to prove a cause, and sometimes to do serious damage. Some hacking might be aimed at specific companies or governments, or possibly be terrorist-related, but the nastiest of the hacker attacks steal our personal information and/or sensitive data by a variety of snooping methods. Viruses, worms, and trojans that exploit security holes in operating system software have infected millions of systems, causing significant headaches, cleanup time, and financial loss. Microsoft, Intel, and many others are developing protected computing environments to combat hacker attacks, while also providing secure computing for sensitive data processing and e-commerce transactions. Platform stability is improved when applications are run in a protected partition.