On 10 April, IBM announced that it will bring mainframe inspired security to the world of consumer products, medical devices, defense systems and digital media. The technology, named "SecureBlue" can be applied to a variety of imaginable equipment that contains valuable confidential or private information as mobile phones, PDA’s, PC’s, notebooks, etc.

In a time when the loss of confidential information is almost daily news, this technology is welcome. SecureBlue is designed to protect the confidential information from unauthorized use through encryption, also using it as an access control for the device. This will make sure the data is safe, even if the device is stolen. The technology of SecureBlue, a cryptography-based protection scheme placed in hardware, normally appears only in high-end expensive equipment. Similar technology can be found in (low) end-user and cheap equipment, but normally these protections are extremely weak and easily broken. Having this technology placed in hardware will make it much more difficult to reverse engineer or hack, and the security can guard the entire device rather than just the data.

It may be some time before SecureBlue will be globally accepted and used as 3rd party manufacturers will need to include the technology. To speed up this process IBM will work closely together with their clients and partners across the different industries to help them implementing SecureBlue in their appliances. Given the strong cryptographic algorithms, wireless communication (WiFi) suddenly may become unbreakable.

Since SecureBlue is also to protect digital media, we can only hope that this implementation, which most likely includes Digital Rights Management features as well, will not be using Rootkit technologies. The chance for this is less likely of course since the encryption is hardware-based and has to be an integrated part of the processor. But since older equipment (as PC’s) will not have this technology applied yet, and the creators of digital content like to have as many potential users as possible, add-on cards supplying this technology will definitely appear and with these, of course the drivers for the operating systems. And these drivers then can be the root of all evil again...