Two technology companies say they have cracked a problem that has quietly limited autonomous AI systems at the network edge: encryption too slow to keep up. Atsign and Intel report that, by combining software identity controls with Intel’s built-in hardware security, they achieved an approximately 88-fold — roughly 8,700 percent — performance improvement for end-to-end encrypted communications between AI agents.
The companies detailed the work in a jointly published solution brief focused on smart transportation, where intersections, traffic corridors and mobility networks increasingly rely on distributed intelligent systems making decisions in real time. In that environment, every device, agent, data exchange and cryptographic key has to be trustworthy, or the entire system’s decisions become suspect.
Under the arrangement described by the companies, Atsign provides trusted identity management, namespace isolation, scoped data sharing, end-to-end encryption and auditability, while Intel contributes hardware-backed key generation, accelerated encryption and hashing, protected key storage, secure boot and related platform protections. The companies say this combination eliminates a major barrier to autonomous edge agents in transportation systems.
The claims come from the vendors themselves and await wider independent benchmarking. But the direction of travel is unmistakable: as AI agents move out of data centers and into cars, intersections and industrial equipment, the security plumbing — identity, encryption and hardware roots of trust — is becoming as commercially important as the models themselves.
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