While business users may be spending a growing portion of their time on mobile devices, the desktop is still the workhorse of the modern office, and requires the security to match. Intel Corp. hopes to make it easier for organizations to maintain the necessary level of protection with the new generation of its Core vPro chips that debuted this week, which packs built-in authentication functionality to prevent unauthorized access.

Starting a workstation that sports one of the new processors under the hood involves providing up to three different login credentials of the IT department’s choosing. The first is a conventional password tied to Active Directory, while the second may be a biometric identifier such as a fingerprint or an iris image that is collected through the machine’s built-in scanner. The third and final obstacle that organizations can put in the way of would-be hackers is requiring every worker to have their mobile device on them while using their designated desktop, which kills two birds with one stone.

Not only does the mechanism make it considerably harder to bypass the login screen, but also provides administrators the option to have a high-priority machine automatically lock up when its user steps away, even if they’re only gone for a few moment. That both reduces the threat from physical security violations and, perhaps equally importantly, improves compliance enforcement. An employee would find it much harder to blame an unauthorized action on a colleague if their machine is only usable when they’re in the immediate vicinity.

The entire authentication process is performed at the chip level, which means there are no unnecessary moving parts hackers could potentially exploit in order to sidestep its defenses. Intel says that the functionality will work with Windows 7 through 10 on launch. However, given that Microsoft Corp. recently decreed new PCs can only run the most recent iteration of its operating system, there probably won’t be much variety to the vCore Pro workstations that will start entering the market over the next few quarters.

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