HP Teams with Hitachi for Security and Privacy Research

HP (www.hp.com) and Hitachi, Ltd. (www.hitachi.com) announced that researchers from HP Labs Bristol, UK., and Princeton, N.J., and the Hitachi Systems Development Laboratory will conduct joint work on key security and privacy issues.

"This collaboration highlights HP Labs and Hitachi Labs' common interest in security research and our aim to bring about secure systems and infrastructure technologies for modern enterprise needs," said Dick Lampman, senior vice president of research, HP, and director, HP Labs.

The HP and Hitachi research collaboration will focus on two primary themes: authenticating users and devices to improve security inside networks and the use of digital signatures to guarantee the authenticity of document content.

The first theme, network security and authentication, has been stimulated by the constant threat to IT infrastructures from, among many others, impersonation, computer viruses and worms.

The researchers are interested in developing technologies for a secure infrastructure that manages communications based on the authentication of the integrity of both the PC and the user.

The goal of this project is to significantly improve important aspects of IT infrastructure security by providing a high-grade, lower-cost technology foundation for enforceable security policy and strengthened identity across a range of devices.

The focus of the second theme, content security research, is to address the problem of how to guarantee the integrity of documents and data by using digital signatures while allowing changes to be made to them.

This process is regularly applied to documents affected by the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and similar laws in other countries. This type of technology also would help ensure the authenticity and integrity of audit trails, an important issue for companies complying with legislation such as Sarbanes-Oxley.

Content security also could be used to demonstrate the integrity of audit trails, for example to third-party auditors, while still retaining confidentiality and privacy of the data contained within.

Dr. Akira Maeda, general manager of Systems Development Laboratory, Hitachi, added: "Hitachi and HP both recognize the increasing importance of security. This collaboration is expected to contribute to a dramatic increase in customer satisfaction by delivering entirely new security backbones."