In an effort to find a more secure way to store data, researchers at IBM have come up with a way to hard wire encryption technology into a processor. Dubbed Secure Blue, the technology is due to be announced today, and will be used all over the place, in digital media players, electronic organisers, mobile phones, computers and all sorts of other stuff. Secure Blue works by data being encrypted and decrypted as it runs through processor. It is maintained encrypted in the device's RAM.
"There is a lot of concern about leakage of data," Charles Palmer, a manager for security and privacy at IBM, said in an interview. "If you have an architecture where that information is always encrypted, you go a long way to protect your data."
One of the main advantages of the technology is that the encryption and decryption happens on the fly, without any processor overhead. Secure Blue requires a few circuits to be added to a processor. The technology is ideal for the sorts of digital rights management that gets folks like the RIAA and MPAA all excited.