McAfee and Intel unveil first jointly developed product

DeepSafe incorporates hardware features to sit between the chip and the OS

McAfee and Intel have showed off their first jointly developed product: a "hardware-assisted" security platform that will sit between the operating system (OS) and the CPU.

At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco (pictured) this week, the chip giant's chief executive, Paul Otellini, unveiled the DeepSafe technology. The software platform is designed to incorporate features present in Intel's hardware and will hit the market later this year. Intel closed its $7.7bn (£4.9bn) acquisition of McAfee six months ago.

Both vendors claim the development is a major leap forwards for the security industry, allowing real-time prevention of infections, rather than purely remedial measures. Intel yesterday displayed the technology's rootkit prevention credentials, demonstrating its ability to prevent a zero-day Agony rootkit in real time.

DeepSafe is designed to slot into the compute stack in between the silicon and the OS, with security applications on top. CPU performance will suffer little impact, claim McAfee and Intel.

Todd Gebhart, co-president of McAfee, said: "This is a tremendous shift for McAfee and one of the biggest innovations in the security industry's history. McAfee DeepSafe uses hardware features already in the Intel processors to provide security beyond the OS."