IBM Will Ship PCs With 256-Bit Encryption

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February 28, 2000 (1:39 PM EST)

By Mo Krochmal,

IBM on Wednesday will announce it will offer for export PCs capable of handling 256-bit digital key encryption.

The machines will be available on March 10, making Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM among the first to make this technology widely available, an IBM executive said.

"We want to introduce the technology as quickly as we can," said Phil Hester, chief technology officer for IBM's personal systems group. "We want this out there, raising the bar for good security and privacy for the business world. We want to work to make it the standard."

IBM received permission from the Department of Commerce last week to build and offer the computers -- part of the U.S. government's move to ease restrictions on the export of encryption technology that at one time was considered the digital equivalent of a munition.

Now, the state of the technology of encryption is such that vendors outside the U.S. would be able to offer a machine with these capabilities. The ruling allows IBM -- and others -- to compete equally.

"It lets market standards rule," said Roger Kay, an analyst at International Data Corp., a Framingham, Mass., market researcher. "This is a cheap piece of silicon that makes it easy for the industry to work."

The IBM machines contain an embedded chip that handles cryptographic functions, and will sell for $1,300 to $2,100.

Hardware encryption implementations are considered more secure methods than software, which can be hacked. In this case, an embedded chip handles the conversion of data into a secret code for transmission over a public network like the Internet.

The encryption algorithm uses a key, which is a binary number 256 bits in length. The greater the number of bits in the key, the more possible key combinations and the longer it would take to break the code.