IBM wins chip security first

IBM has earned international government validation for its chip security, the only company to have achieved the Common Criteria certification with PC chips.

Big Blue has been awarded the certification by the US National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) - a partnership between the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the secretive US National Security Agency (NSA).

The certification is recognised in 14 countries, including the UK and much of Europe, allowing the product to be procured by governments without undergoing security testing, as it already reaches a certain benchmark.

The chip is used in IBM's NetVista PCs and ThinkPad notebooks and can be used to store encryption keys. IBM said building this functionality into the hardware made the product inherently more secure than PCs which use software-based encryption.