At the world wide web conference in Honolulu last month, Richard DeMillo, Hewlett-Packards vice president of technology strategy and chief technology officer, announced HP will release a set of secure platforms to the open-source community. SPA (Secure Platform Architecture) is a set of software interfaces built on top of HPs Itanium-based product line and will be ready in the next 18 months.
SPA will enable operating systems and device drivers to be run as unprivileged tasks and will allow services to be authenticated and identified. The architecture will also let enterprises run multiple operating system images—for public and private infrastructure, for example—on the same security platform.
HP has begun porting the SPA platform to Linux. The hope is for operating system vendors, including Microsoft and Sun, to do the same with the Windows and Solaris environments, respectively, DeMillo said.