With some analysts beginning to take a harder look at just how successful the Itanium series of chip can be in an increasingly competitive 64-bit chip market, the arrival of startup Secure64 Software could not come at a better time. The new company, which had its formal coming out party launched on Monday, was founded in 2002 by a group of ex-Hewlett-Packard executives including Bill Worley who was the technical director of PA-RSC and PA-Wor. The latter project eventually evolved into the first generation of Itanium processors. What is driving the company is its belief that there is yet to be delivered any software to take full advantage of Itanium’s range of capabilities, most notably its own built-in security architecture and its superior performance capabilities.A group of the company’s co-founders discussed their upcoming software, scheduled to enter beta testing in the next four to six weeks, and the market opportunities for it that may lie ahead with Editor At Large Ed Scannell.IW: The 64-bit market is where the future is, but why Itanium? Cranstone: If you look back at the major inflection points of the industry, the real critical junction is always when someone comes along with a piece of software that truly leverages the full range of architectural capabilities of a chip. So when Bill (Worley) came along, I only had one question for him: What makes Itanium so special. It must be something in there we do not understand yet. Bill said two things that make it unique. One is its parallel processing capability and ability to support a sustained maximum of 8 instructions per cycle. In comparison, the Pentium can sustain a maximum of three and other RISC chips a maximum of four. But in reality they do not ever hit those theoretical numbers. So we saw there the possibility for a huge performance gain with Itanium. Second, another unique aspect is the chip has a whole security architecture inside that no one has focused on.IW: How did you proceed?Cranstone: Bill’s idea was if we could come up with a simpler software structure that was extensible and that could leverage the inherent power of the chip, then it could create a great opportunity. Again, looking back to the inflection point that drove both Windows and Intel in 1995, it was the convergence of the Windows OS, the applications, and the developer toolkits that were all leveraged to take advantage of up to the 4 gigabytes of memory. If you look at our four core patents, we have focused our energy on a very simple structure. It is not an OS, it an execution environment that is designed as a simple structure that is extensible but really gives you access to the full power that is contained within Itanium. Worley: If you look at the way systems have evolved, we see some natural forces driving that evolution, particularly among OSes. Operating systems have been driven by two factors. One is they want to be fully general and incorporate all the capabilities that users and application developers want. At the same time they want to remain portable. It is this second objective that has caused them to basically stick with a security model, a model established in the 1960s by IBM with the mainframe with its of one level of privilege, where the OS and I/O drivers run, and an other level of privilege where application run. Other hardware architectures have had richer capabilities for security but the OS does not use them because it would make them non-portable. At the same time, as their generality has grown, more and more abstractions have been added onto the system. What one finds on the desktop today on a PC is really a staggering number of functionalities, and a collection of abstractions that were not found even on the largest machines of the 1960s and 1970s.But this generality has not come without a cost, and that cost is the complexity in cycles.But one of the questions we asked ourselves was, suppose we had all those hardware gains, but could somehow divorce it from the overheads that have been piled on by general purpose OSes? The feeling we had was, there was a lot of performance being left on the table. We have our technology running in the labs now and we have satisfied ourselves in that one goes for the performance that is there, it is really substantial. Not ready to talk about specific benchmarks or products now. We are not ready to talk specifics today but the measurements we have established at the labs have convinced us there is really a big payoff there. IW: What sort of technical advantages are inherent in Itanium and not present in competing chips?Worley: One of the classic problems in security that has never been solved is where to keep cryptographic key information inside the machine. In 1998 there was a paper called, “Playing Hide And Seek With Stored Keys,” What it showed is there are very simple algorithms where if you can get into the system under the guise of being an I/O driver and simply scan the physical memory, and so you can identify everything that is a crypto key. Many people recommend today, for instance, that when you develop your key material you get rid of it as quick as you can because if someone can find it they can compromise you. This is a problem generally thought not to be solvable in today’s systems. With the Itanium however it is solvable because one can construct a compartment and keep this information inside a compartment that is impervious to penetration. And if one organizes the software as we outline in our patents, one can show it is impossible for that security to be breached.IW: So what are the shorter term market opportunities as a result of these breakthroughs? Cranstone: Look at a couple of market segments that are interested in higher performance namely financial transactions and e-commerce transactions. One is where time is money and the other is related to money and on-line shopping. A very significant amount of money was spent online in the last quarter, something like $23 billion. When you went shopping online this year you probably could see it takes a lot of time to be able to process the data. So anything that can be done to improve the processing capabilities will result in direct financial gain for those e-commerce providers. Plus, if you remember when MasterCard’s data base was hacked and they ran off with all those credit card numbers? The ability to store private keys and confidential data in these secure compartments we have discussed is a significant improvement. We are looking at two other areas, multi-media as it is related to movies and movie distribution i.e. the ability for Hollywood to have a higher degree of confidence to store movies within these compartments and so would be very difficult to hack. Second, since 9/11, we have seen a large increase in secure data replication and the desire to secure that data off site. The problems with doing that is I have to transmit it securely and make sure it is secure at the other end. As we said all you have to do is submit a malicious driver and you can get control of ring zero.IW: Why hasn’t HP come up with this technology?Cranestone: Intel and HP have been big supporters of our company and we are working closely with them. They recognize what this problem is all about. IW: Will you license this technology to Intel, HP, and other chip makers? How do you plan to make money with this?Cranstone: The are multiple ways to package it right now and that is why we are working on with HP and Intel, looking at different distribution mechanisms that can be used with this technology. We are looking at the shortest way to market at the moment. We have been in touch with (HP vice president) Don Jenkins group at HP for over a year.IW: When do you expect to go into beta and deliver the finished product? Cranstone: The current plan for the rollout is for evaluation customers to get it in the next month to month-and-a-half time frame. The whole idea there will be to validate our existing benchmarks and make sure they are in line with customer expectations. In other words really find out what the customers need. They likely are going to want things we have not thought of. As we integrate those changes we will then roll it up into beta with a launch of late summer of this year. Technology Industry