Attacks on endpoints are increasingly frequent and sophisticated, so protection must begin even before the operating system starts. The talk showed how the HP Wolf Security approach layers defenses from firmware through threat isolation to recovery and trust in the supply chain.
When security starts before boot
Device firmware has high privileges, often outside the operating system’s purview, so digital signatures and firmware integrity are checked both before boot and at runtime. If an anomaly is detected, the system is rolled back to the last known good state and a record is created for later analysis and fulfilling reporting obligations. The goal is for the user to know the state the device is booting in and be able to trust it.
Physical attacks are also a risk, for example obtaining BitLocker keys from the TPM chip via so‑called sniffing. Devices can therefore have chassis intrusion sensors and policies that erase keys in the TPM when tampering is detected, or protect the communication bus. This leaves the attacker only the cumbersome option of brute‑forcing the encryption, which is practically ineffective.
Isolation of risky files and agent resilience
E‑mails and documents are often carriers of malicious code, so the solution isolates opened files and web sessions into lightweight virtual machines. If malware runs, it remains trapped in the isolated environment, with no access to local resources or to other browser tabs. The security operations center also receives a precise timeline and classification according to the MITRE framework, which makes investigation easier. To prevent such protection from being disabled, a hardware security controller on the motherboard can relaunch and restore key agents if they are removed.
Rapid recovery, remote wipe, and trust in the supply chain
In the event of an attack, what is decisive is how quickly you can return devices to operation. The recovery solution allows the primary operating system to be installed from a defined source—a local partition, dedicated on‑platform storage, or a network location—without the device having to be physically brought to IT. It can then be taken over by, for example, Microsoft Autopilot to complete configuration, so the return to production does not take weeks.
If a device is lost, HP Wolf Protect and Trace technology makes it possible to locate it, remotely lock it at the hardware level, or cryptographically wipe it—which is also important for meeting legal obligations. To verify the integrity of the delivery, you can use a platform certificate: a digitally signed list of hardware components from the manufacturer that can be validated locally. In sensitive environments, the first boot can be conditioned on asymmetric cryptography with algorithms resistant to quantum attacks according to NIST recommendations, so that the device is first unlocked by your certificate authority only after logistics.
