HP, Inc. today unveiled a notebook designed to thwart any effort to use physical force to bypass BitLocker drive encryption by extracting data directly from the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) bus on a device that has been stolen.
Additionally, HP announced it is making a cellular card available through which it can provide recovery services and a series of printers that can now be configured with quantum-resistant encryption.
Announced at an HP Imagine 2026 event in New York, HP TPM Guard adds an encrypted link between the TPM and CPU, preventing interception and probing attacks. The TPM is cryptographically bound to the device, rendering it inoperable if tampered or removed. HP developed firmware for both the TPM and the CPU to establish that encrypted connection. The company has also submitted a proposal to the Trusted Computing Group to contribute TPM Guard technology as an industry standard.
Dr. Ian Pratt, vice president and CTO for security and commercial and personal systems at HP, said the goal is to thwart TPM bus attacks, a technique relies on attackers intercepting communication between the TPM and the CPU that can take less than a minute to perform using just $20 of hardware.
It’s not clear to what degree cybersecurity concerns have become a major factor in IT purchasing decisions, but as more devices are stolen there is now a greater risk that data will wind up in the wrong hands, noted Pratt. Even if data is stored in the cloud it’s probable a copy of it has been stored in cache on a local machine, he added.
More troubling still, the amount of data that is likely to be stored or cached on a device is only going to increase in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), he added.
Each IT organization will need to determine how aggressively they may want to replace IT infrastructure to address everything from the theft of machines to post quantum computing threats that are expected to be able to break most legacy encryption schemes. The challenge, of course, is IT budgets are not unlimited but the more cybersecurity issues are addressed at the hardware level the less likely it becomes there will be an incident that disrupts operations.
The degree to which IT teams are assuming responsibility for cybersecurity varies widely. However, there is a general shift toward enabling IT teams to assume more responsibility for security operations (SecOps). That convergence then enables cybersecurity teams to spend more time thwarting attacks and developing policies versus managing security infrastructure.
Hopefully, there will come a day when IT infrastructure of all types is fundamentally more secure. In the meantime, however, savvy IT teams and their cybersecurity colleagues are now more focused on IT resiliency than ever. Given the volume of cyberattacks it’s only a question of when there will be some type of breach. The challenge and the opportunity is not only to reduce the number of breaches but also prepare the organization to respond, contain and remediate a breach as fast as possible.
