Intel enlists universities in security wars
Intel has launched a security-research collaboration with major US universities, saying that all research results will be made public, and all software developed in the program will be open sourced.
The collaboration between Intel and university faculty and graduate students will be the second in the Intel Science and Technology Center program, a $100m effort that was announced this January. The first ISTC focused on visual computing, and paired Intel researchers with Stanford University and affiliates at the Universities of California at Berkeley, Davis, and Irvine; the University of Washington, Harvard, Cornell, and Princeton.
The new security-focused ISTC wil be centered at the University of California at Berkeley, and will also involve researchers at the University of Illinois, Duke, Carnegie Mellon, and Drexel. As with the Stanford-based ISTC, the Berkeley-centered effort will have one principal investigator from the lead university, UCB professor of computer science David Wagner, and one from Intel, senior principal engineer John Manferdelli.
Speaking on Tuesday at the annual Research@Intel event in Mountain View, California, Manferdelli explained one of the reasons security research is needed. "The cloud will benefit you by allowing the synchronization of all your activities," he said, "but right now we don't have a very good way of ensuring users that their data – users, companies people – are used only in the manner that they expect."
