Cybersecurity firm Atsign and Intel have announced a hardware and identity-management collaboration that they say delivers up to an 88-fold increase in the speed of encrypted communications between AI agents operating at the network edge, a bottleneck the companies say has held back autonomous systems in transportation.
Atsign, based in San Jose, California, said the performance uplift applies to hardware-accelerated, end-to-end encrypted agent-to-agent communications when its platform is combined with Intel’s hardware security features.
“Intel and Atsign, representing the forefront of edge hardware and trusted identity management respectively, have today delivered a performance breakthrough: a genuinely secure foundation for agentic edge AI deployments in smart transportation environments, which are no longer constrained by something as mundane as ‘technical performance’,” said Aparna Rayasam, chief executive of Atsign. “This is a game-changing evolution for anyone involved in the development of any system in which AI-enabled devices are required to operate autonomously at the edge, where both trust and speed are essential.”
Solution brief targets transport infrastructure
The two companies have co-published a Smart Transportation Solution Brief, titled “Securing Agentic AI at the Edge for Smart Transportation”, which sets out the case for distributed, intelligent transportation infrastructure in which edge systems, operations platforms and autonomous agents work together across intersections, traffic corridors and mobility networks. As transportation becomes more autonomous, the brief argues, trust becomes essential: every device, AI agent, data exchange, cryptographic key and workload needs to be secured to support safe, reliable decision-making at scale.
To address this, the new solution combines Atsign’s agent-to-agent architecture, which provides trusted identity management, namespace isolation, scoped data sharing, end-to-end encryption and auditability, with Intel’s hardware security capabilities. These include hardware-backed key generation, accelerated encryption and hashing, protected key storage, secure boot, Trusted Compute, Total Memory Encryption and Full Disk Encryption.
Performance figures vary by hardware
According to the companies, the solution brief sets out new zero-trust agentic AI performance benchmarks that vary depending on the hardware used. An approximately 88-fold performance uplift is available on Intel Xeon processors, reaching speeds of up to 5 Gbps, while Intel Core Ultra 9 processors see an approximately 60-fold uplift, reaching up to 6 Gbps.
Intel has also added Atsign to its Industrial Builders partner program. The companies said this gives Intel customers de-risked deployments through access to Atsign’s pre-validated solutions, streamlined sourcing, confidence that Atsign meets Intel’s compliance standards, and a direct route to Atsign for requests for proposals, reference architectures or proof-of-concept work.
Atsign describes itself as a platform that secures people, applications, AI agents and devices so they can communicate over hostile networks, authenticating participants before a connection is established and protecting data end-to-end without exposed inbound ports or reliance on static IP addresses.
