Infineon and PGP Corp team up to enhance security

Posted by Ken Y-N on April 23rd, 2008 at 01:53pm

As a regular and happy user of PGP software, this new announcement is of particular interest to me. Infineon Technologies AG of Germany and the PGP Corporation of the USA have collaborated to enhance PGP’s Whole Disk Encryption and other solutions by leveraging Infineon’s Trusted Computing Management Server (TCMS) to enable provisioning and management of PGP software installations on client machines.

Many, if not most, new corporate computers include Trusted Platform Modules (TPM) security microcontrollers, so now Infineon’s TCMS can help unlock the potential of these chips through central management. The TPMs can add a second authentication factor on top of the usual password protection for PGP’s Whole Disk Encryption, and with the TCMS these TPM keys can be securely backed-up. Other corporate information security functions such as recovery, logging, provisioning and policy management can also be realised.

Infineon’s client is already pre-installed by many top-rank PC manufacturers, and even though they are a market leader in producing the TPM chips, their TPM Professional Client is TPM vendor-neutral, and will soon be shipped with Intel’s v1.2 TPMs.

PGP Corp’s President and CEO Phil Dunkelberger had this to say:

“We are excited to be working with Infineon, a leading TPM hardware and software vendor, to meet the challenges of managing keys and security policies across the ever-increasing breadth of security solutions being deployed. Besides offering our joint customers a unique and powerful security solution, this announcement validates the PGP Encryption Platform strategy by demonstrating its extensibility across a broad range of data protection technologies.”

The full story may be found here.

Tags: infineon, pgp

Under TPM Tags: infineon, pgp