With cyber-attack frequency ever on the increase and new threats emerging constantly, technology leaders are collaborating on disruptive advances to better prevent, detect, and repel the latest assaults.
ESET and Intel have a long history of collaboration at the front lines of this combat, and ESET is poised to launch new features based on Intel’s latest hardware-based defenses. These enhancements will further increase modern endpoint security efficiency and accelerate incident detection in joint customer environments.
Accelerating cybersecurity workloads on Intel-powered AI PCs
Though the necessity for advanced, AI-driven threat detection grows by the day, IT leaders must still balance cybersecurity system resource needs against the performance and productivity requirements of remote and hybrid work scenarios and AI workloads. Symbiosis is required, with hardware providers fielding “AI PCs” that include not only Central Processing Units (CPU) and Graphics Processing Units (GPU) but are now introducing Neural Processing Units (NPU) that offer optimized processing for specific workload types. Endpoint security tools must leverage these increased compute resources too, improving protection while maintaining low impact to system performance to avoid draining users’ compute resources or batteries.
To give customers the full benefit of this boost to speed and efficiency, ESET is engineering its endpoint products to use all available compute engines to the optimal extent. For example, ESET endpoint security software, when paired with Intel® Core™ Ultra-based PCs, can now automatically offload compute-intensive workloads from the CPU to the Intel integrated (GPU) or the (NPU). This saves the CPU for business-critical and performance-intensive tasks like video conferencing and data analysis and can also improve system efficiency.
Improving endpoint performance and efficiency with NPU computing
The evolutionary step ESET is taking, leverages specific advantages of the (NPU) within Intel’s Core Ultra processor’s architecture which manages distribution of those AI workloads in our endpoint products that can benefit from executing on the NPU. For this reason, the neural network models inside our endpoint-based machine learning module are an important early use case.
Distributing the abovementioned workloads to the GPU and/or NPU within the Intel Core Ultraprocessor can also yield improved power utilization without compromising protection-related performance.
Performance indicators in ESET’s testing of prototype processors with ESET Endpoint Security products have yielded promising improvements, including a 5% speedup in scan duration and a 3.5% reduction in CPU load for scans with approximately the same duration.
This effectively increases the scale of ESET’s neural model computations to improve customers’ endpoint resiliency with no negative efficiency or performance impacts. Processing will be even more efficient, as ESET security products can call in the NPU for help with performance-heavy tasks such as AI or ML calculations, decreasing the time it takes to process detections.
These improvements will become increasingly valuable in future, for example when the intention is to compute resource intensive or sensitive components of workloads locally and bolstering security when accessing cloud-based AI resources. “These early gains demonstrate our dedication to engineering products that have a low impact on system performance, an area that ESET has always prioritized within its multi-layered software architecture and one that is a key selling point for many of our clients. Leveraging tech within Intel-powered AI PC architecture that can help us with prevention and protection, while also preserving performance is a win-win choice,” says Elod Kironsky, Vice President of Endpoint Solutions and Security Technologies at ESET.
Leveraging Intel hybrid architecture
Our joint efforts on the AI PC are further supported by other recent optimizations of ESET Endpoint protection software, which also take advantage of Intel’s latest hybrid processor architecture – with performance and efficient cores, utilizing either core type based on task relevance. With hybrid awareness ESET Endpoint Security, already recognized for its low-performance overhead, low false positive rates, and multi-layered capabilities, the potential is even greater.
According to Elod Kironsky: “Assigning workloads to efficient cores has no negative impact on product performance, and performance increases have been documented in several scenarios meaning that we can ensure profound protection without disrupting key processes.”
Further AI PC possibilities
Researching the potential of AI PC architecture is just one of the areas ESET is exploring with Intel to improve cybersecurity and user experience. Other possibilities include use of the NPU in:
• Creating small neural network models specific to a given malware family. This would enable faster, more consistent, and more precise detection of these malware strains
.• Image recognition using neural networks to identify phishing and other scams or enhance adult content filtering.
• Leveraging large language models (LLMs) to describe endpoint incident detections to both improve forensics and documentation.The possibilities are exciting and quite numerous. With AI PCs built on Intel Core Ultra processors, there is a high potential to see marked improvements to attributes of both protection and prevention capabilities.
Reshaping cybersecurity’s future
ESET’s ongoing collaboration with innovation partners like Intel underscores the need to go beyond incremental product improvements and instead seek substantial leaps that reshape the cybersecurity landscape. The future of endpoint security is an integrated multi-layered hardware/software approach that encompasses AI computing resources and supports hybrid and remote work scenarios.
ESET’s R&D team will continue to innovate with Intel across future generations of processors that are built to power AI PCs. The shared innovation space leveraging the CPU, GPU and NPU serves to protect businesses from both known and unknown threats and to future-proof the critical interface between software and hardware-based cybersecurity technologies.
The ESET “hybrid aware” capability is currently in release in the latest ESET consumer products and joined by NPU (and GPU offload) features in our upcoming Endpoint product line from December 2024 onward.
by James Shepperd, ESET
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