Sure Sense AI Technology Promises Less Malware Infection In HP Laptops

April 21, 2019
by Julia Sowells
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The term Artificial Intelligence for at least the last five years was abused and still being abused by many marketing teams. It is like the magic word that may help the company persuade more buyers of an electronic product or a web service. Yes, there is real artificial intelligence in some products like a console game, where the antagonists and NPCs (Non-playable characters) are controlled by artificial intelligence.

But what about a regular computer, such as an off-the-shelf laptop, is Artificial Intelligence in it useful at all? That is something HP is trying to convince its potential customers with their Elitebook 800 laptop series for 2019. The AI technology they built on the laptops under the Elitebook 800 series is dubbed as “Sure Sense”, designed to help prevent malware for corporate workstation-class laptops through the use of hardware-based heuristics detection.

“This goes beyond every security technology today because today most primarily block against known malware. This [blocks] both known and unknown malware. It’s able to detect never-before-seen malware, and stop 99 percent of them in less than 20 seconds,” explained Alex Cho, HP’s Personal Systems Business President.

The Sure Sense technology is built-in with the UEFI of the Elitebook 800 laptops, which protects the firmware from being overwritten and tampered by external software not approved by HP. Sure Sense also interacts with Windows 10, hardening the PC from malicious files and phishing links.

“One small breach can be catastrophic. You’ve sort of got to fight fire with fire. Malware is being created with AI, so you need to attack it with AI. It’s the brain that says, ‘I know what malware looks like—and this looks like a malware, this smells like a malware, it is malware. (Sure Sense will) be able to process that in real time—do it in the time it takes to open a file—and shut that process down,” added Cho.

It is not yet known how successful Sure Sense technology will be against malware, especially the top two types that give companies a run for their money, the ransomware, and crypto jacking. Intel and AMD more than a decade ago tried aggressively to prevent malware or even any software from executing code from is stored in the data buffer. Also, known as Execute Disable Bit, it lessens the effectiveness of malware as processors that have Execute Disable Bit strictly executes code only under the instruction cache.

“What they’re doing with AI, that is just far beyond what we’ve ever seen before. This is the active mitigation of attacks on a machine in real time. It’s a huge announcement for HP to get into that game. That’s not a traditional HP play. You’ve got firewall vendors that do this at the edge, you’ve got infrastructure vendors that do this on the internal side of the network, and then you have software manufacturers that are doing this on the endpoint. That disrupts a lot of things that we’re used to doing in the IT space,” said Juan Fernandez, ImageNet Consulting VP of Managed IT Services, when asked for feedback about HP Sure Sense.

Source: https://www.crn.com.au/news/hp-reveals-first-notebooks-with-malware-blocking-ai-524014

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