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Frost & Sullivan Commends Cryptography Research for Technology Leadership
September 2009 by Emmanuelle Lamandé
Cryptography Research, Inc. has been conferred the Frost & Sullivan "2009 World Smart Card Technology Leadership of the Year Award," for its outstanding overall performance including excellence in technology innovation, business development, formulation of a competitive strategy, and industry adoption rates.
The company discovered differential power analysis (DPA) in the late 1990’s, working closely with industry leaders to implement countermeasures to the vulnerability. The company developed and owns a dominant Intellectual Property (IP) position for DPA countermeasures.
The discovery of DPA is of vital significance not only to the smart card industry, but also to all tamper resistance chips. It is relevant for all applications in the smart card industry such as pay TV, payment, Subscriber Identity Module (SIM), and identification. DPA is also significant in other industries such as defence.
DPA already plays a critical role in the market, and any chip or card that does not have a DPA countermeasure is fundamentally insecure. So, all vendors utilise DPA countermeasures of varying degrees.
The discovery of DPA laid the foundation an entire class of security research called Side Channel Analysis. DPA remains the most powerful, adaptive, and inexpensive of these attacks and thus, it is the primary concern of security designers.
Cryptography Research is looking to deepen its commercial penetration with semiconductor manufacturers, smart card vendors, and issuers. The company understands that a license to one part of the value chain allows the entire supply chain to benefit. Within the last year, five of the top six smart card semiconductor manufacturers - Atmel, Infineon, NXP, Renesas, and Samsung - became licensing clients, Cryptography Research successfully settled its lawsuit with Visa, Inc., and MasterCard began requiring that its suppliers be licensed under Cryptography Research’s patent portfolio. This year more than 4 billion security chips will be made with DPA countermeasures licensed by Cryptography Research, making Cryptography Research one of the highest-volume and highest-value technology licensors in the semiconductor industry.
The Frost & Sullivan Technology Leadership of the Year Award is bestowed each year upon the company that has demonstrated excellence in technology leadership within its industry. The recipient company has demonstrated technology leadership by excelling in all stages of the technology life cycle-incubation, adaptation, take-up, and maturity to ensure a continuous flow of improvements. By innovating leading-edge concepts, the company has pioneered client applications.
