Hewlett Packard and Hitachi Ltd. have announced that researchers at HP Labs Bristol, UK., and in Princeton, N.J., and the Hitachi Systems Development Laboratory will conduct a joint effort on key security and privacy issues. Together, they will focus on two primary themes: authenticating users and devices to improve security inside networks and using digital signatures to guarantee the authenticity of document content.

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The first theme, network security and authentication, has been stimulated by the constant threat to Internet Technology (IT) infrastructures by impersonation, computer viruses and worms. To combat these threats, HP and Hitachi researchers will investigate how to ensure that computers used to access corporate networks remotely-—from home or from a hotel room, for instance--are appropriately authorized. The researchers are interested in developing technologies for a secure infrastructure that manages communications based on the authentication of the integrity of both the PC and the user.

The focus of the second theme, content security research, is to address the problem of how to guarantee the integrity of documents and data by using digital signatures while still allowing changes to be made to them.

For example, it may be necessary to delete sensitive data such as names and company secrets from a document for reasons of privacy or confidentiality, yet show that the visible portion of the document is authentic. This process is regularly applied to documents affected by the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and similar laws in other countries. This technology also will help to ensure the authenticity and integrity of audit trails, an important issue for companies who must comply with legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. This law established the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board to oversee the audit of public companies that are subject to the security laws.