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“Advances have often been done in steps, and beyond approximately 10 years into the future, the general feeling among ECRYPT partners is that recommendations made today should be assigned a rather small confidence level, perhaps in particular for asymmetric primitives.”
European ECRYPT Network of Excellence, “Yearly Report on Algorithms and Key Lengths (2007-2008)", 2008 -
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"Unfortunately, the security issues of a technology near the end of its lifetime are typically overlooked. The best known example is that of cryptographic keys and algorithms which may need to offer in some cases security for 50 to 100 years."
SecurIST, “D3.3 – ICT Security & Dependability Research beyond 2010: Final Strategy”, January 2007 -
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“The software security industry today is at about the same stage as the auto industry was in 1930" ... "it looks fast, goes nice but in an accident you die.” ... "The major shortfall is absence of assurance (or safety) mechanisms in software. If my car crashed as often as my computer does, I would be dead by now."
Brian Snow, Former Technical Director of the US National Security Agency (NSA), "We need assurance!", 1999-2008
Assisted digital signatures
Synaptic has designed a proprietary method of adapting Lamport-Diffie-Merkle digital signature schemes to generate up to 100 year signatures using standard cryptographic hash functions to take advantage of the processing power of a partially untrusted host computer in a secure fashion.
Notary digital signatures
A technique for enabling 10 to 100 year secure digital signatures on smart cards that do not have the processing power to perform any of the computational work. In this example Synaptic Labs' Enterprise and Universal key exchange servers can be adapted as Lamport-Diffie-Merkle digital signatures notaries.
PQSDES digital signatures
Lamport-Diffie-Merkle digital signatures require high speed hash functions. PQSDES converts the US NIST DES block cipher into a family of cryptographic hash functions offering 10 to 100 year security. PQSDES was explicitly designed to take advantage of the DES hardware circuitry present in most smart cards to provide the necessary acceleration for Lamport-Diffie-Merkle digital signature operations. PQSDES digital signatures also perform efficiently on modern desktop environments.
Lamport-Diffie-Merkle signatures
Lamport-Diife-Merkle digital signatures were invented at approximately the same time as the mainstream RSA digital signatures. Lamport-Diife-Merkle digital signatures are based on cryptographic hash functions. Significant work has been undertaken by the Technischen Universität Darmstadt (TUD) and Hitachi to optimise the performance and efficiency of the original schemes.
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Achieve a higher level of data integrity security and avoid the drama of a widely anticipated catastrophic security failure in the integrity of your electronic contracts and sensitive archived data. Technischen Universität Darmstadt (TUD), Hitachi and Synaptic Laboratories are three of the world's leading researchers into Lamport-Diffie-Merkle digital signature technologies for embedded micro environments. The advantage of Lamport-Diffie-Merkle signature schemes is that their security is derived from the security of the chosen cryptographic hash function used to implement them. This is highly desirable as modern standards-based cryptographic hash functions such as SHA-256 and SHA-512 are widely conjectured to offer a high level of security against quantum computers. Researchers at TUD designed the Coronado Merkle Signature Scheme (CMSS) and released it as a free defacto-standard. Researchers at Hitachi and TUD latter co-developed the proprietary Generalised Merkle Signature Scheme (GMSS) which has additional performance features over CMSS. Synaptic has independently built on the outstanding published work of Hitachi and TUD with an innovative range of practical solutions that enable smart cards to run stronger instances of these algorithms. |
| Last Updated on Sunday, 04 January 2009 11:52 |

