Defend Your Data

Attacks on our personal and business data have become one of the leading issues in computing today. Hackers systematically search computers for photos, credit card information, passwords, company documents and anything else that can be sold or mischievously used. This security risk is heightened on notebooks that suffer on both a virtual and physical front. Notebooks are often stolen by hackers, and their contents either sold or used to attack other computers.

For companies, exposure to this threat can be crippling. Most businesses today, especially ones that incorporate networks into their technology model, have notebook computers in use at some level. Notebooks tend to be the weakest point in technology models due to employees storing important company data locally on the hard drive, which is made dangerous due to the fact that notebooks can be more easily stolen.

What happens if you don't Defend your Data?

Many news articles have appeared over the last couple of years detailing what happens when data is stolen either virtually or through physical theft. These articles show that everyone, from small businesses to government agencies, can be affected by this problem, resulting in a range of unpleasant after-effects, from the theft of customer data including social security and credit card numbers to detailed government plans of future fighter jets. This is not just an embarrassing public relations event for a corporation or government, it can prove devastating to consumer confidence and directly impact profits or even national security.

Nor are home users immune, as they are exposed in the same manner as business and governments. Personal photos and files are stolen and published on the Internet or sold to criminal organizations, while personal banking and financial information is also collected and fraudulently used or sold by these criminals.

How VIA PadLock helps Defend Your Data

To safeguard against this threat, many software based solutions have been developed, most of which provide reasonable data security. However, these solutions have a tendency to considerably slow the system they are running on, causing sluggish performance, due to the high demands made on the processor to perform the real-time encryption (computationally speaking, security mathematics are the hardest type of calculation that a processor can handle). Especially on mobile platforms where the length of battery life is significantly affected by the level and rate of processor load, this often leads users to either remove the security software from their PC/notebook or to spend large amounts of money attempting to upgrade their computer.

The VIA PadLock Security Engine helps solve this problem. Integrated within the main processor, the security Engine is designed to handle all the calculations required by encryption and decryption. When used, VIA PadLock can perform the encryption required for data security in real-time with little or no load on the main processor. This means users can have greater peace of mind while running their normal applications with little or no performance loss.

VIA PadLock also increases the quality of the encryption process by including a quantum-based random number generator. This is important to the encryption process since the strength of the keys used to secure data depends on the randomness of the numbers used. Software random numbers base their randomness on keystrokes and mouse movements which, while random, over a period of time can become predictable. However, a quantum approach to randomness is far more effective and generates unpredictable random numbers.

All of this culminates in giving the user a solution that provides strong security with almost no main processor load. This is particularly applicable to notebook users, where VIA PadLock helps sustain the battery life of notebooks by reducing the power demands on the processor during the encryption process, particularly when compared to the equivalent software encryption process.