In these days of widespread computer usage, data stored on a computer system is becoming increasingly accessible to a variety of users. This may occur directly in real time via local and/or remote use of a computer system by different users or indirectly via the loading and running of computer programs at predetermined times automatically or manually by a user of the computer system. With the advent of computer networks allowing remote access to computer systems via local area networks and wide area networks such as the Internet, and the ready transfer of computer programs and data between computer systems, either manually via floppy disks and CD ROMs or automatically via computer networks, the security and integrity of data and information stored on the read/write stores of computers is becoming increasingly of paramount importance.
It is now common place for computer systems to incorporate “anti-virus” software in order to protect the data and information stored on the storage device thereof from hostile computer programs, and user authentication procedures allowing predetermined levels of access to data and information stored on the storage device of the computer system, dependent upon the status of the user.
A problem with most types of anti-virus software and user authentication protocols used today is the very fact that they are embodied in software, which is required to be executed under the control of the operating system of the computer. Hence, a pre-requisite for such anti-virus or user authentication software to function correctly is that the computer system must be able to power-on, boot-up and invoke the operating system “cleanly”, without any virus or security defeating processes affecting the computer during this time.
In the case of anti-virus software, most of this software depends upon having some knowledge of the virus or type of virus that it is attempting to secure the system from. Hence, the anti-virus software needs to be constantly updated and entered onto the computer system before a particular virus finds its way to the computer system.
As certain viruses can be extremely hostile and destructive to computer systems, the lag time between the first occurrence of a virus and the production of software to combat the virus still creates a window within which oftentimes irreparable damage can occur to certain computer systems infected with such a virus. Indeed, the production of viruses and anti-virus software does have a tendency to be self-perpetuating. Thus whilst better solutions may have been proposed in the past to combat viruses and ensuring the security of data and information, the state of the art has remained around adopting a software approach to deal with the problem.
Notwithstanding this, various hardware-based solutions, which are intrinsically more reliable and resilient in preventing virus or unauthorized access to data stored on a computer system, have been proposed in the past. However, these have been awkward to apply, restricted in their adaptablility to different and changing formatting standards or have required user interaction of a technical nature well beyond the mere loading of executable programs, in order to make them effective or even operational.