• "History has taught us: never underestimate the amount of money, time, and effort someone will expend to thwart a security system. It's always better to assume the worst. Assume your adversaries are better than they are. Assume science and technology will soon be able to do things they cannot yet. Give yourself a margin for error. Give yourself more security than you need today. When the unexpected happens, you'll be glad you did."

    Bruce Schneier, "Why Cryptography Is Harder Than It Looks", 1997
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  • "Some physicists predicted that within the next 10 to 20 years quantum computers will be built that are sufficiently powerful to implement Shor’s ideas and to break all existing public key schemes. Thus we need to look ahead to a future of quantum computers, and we need to prepare the cryptographic world for that future.”

    Prof Seth Lloyd of MIT, MIT Review 2008

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  • "First and foremost, there is no proper excuse for continued use of a broken cryptographic primitive (MD5) when sufficiently strong alternatives are readily available, for example SHA-2. Secondly, there is no substitute for security awareness." ... "Advice from experts should be taken seriously and early in the process. In this case, MD5 should have been phased out soon after 2004."

    Alexander Sotirov, Marc Stevens, Jacob Appelbaum, Arjen Lenstra, David Molnar, Dag Arne Osvik, Benne de Wegerr, "MD5 considered harmful today - Creating a rogue CA certificate", December 2008
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Home Technologies Key exchanges

Group KX

A low cost alternative to commercial quantum key distribution systems for applications requiring a higher level of security assurance without the performance limitations of QKD. Suitable for securing highly sensitive communications between groups of hundreds of devices located anywhere on the globe over any data communications networks.   

Enterprise KX

A flexible low cost key exchange infrastructure capable of 10 to 100 year security for inter-organisation communications and communications within an industry sector.  Prevents against multiple points of trust failure by online key exchange service providers. Suitable for environments with millions of users.

Universal KX

A scalable global online key exchange infrastructure capable of 100 year security between billions of users. Employs a federated distributed decentralised architecture that manages the complex web of divergent trust relationships that exist between users of the key exchange infrastructure. 

Synaptic 2 stage key exchanges

In Synaptic Labs' key exchange solutions the steps used to exchange the first key between two devices is different from the steps used to exchange each additional session key. Label 1 illustrates that an initial Group, Universal or Enterprise key exchange requires the assistance of at least one third party. After the first key exchange is complete the smart cards can now rapidly exchange new session keys directly with each other without any assistance as illustrated in label 2. 

Synaptic key exchanges home

Exceed the expected 10 year security lifetime of key exchanges based on public key technologies!

With the Enterprise Key Exchange and Universal Key Exchange technologies, Synaptic Laboratories is ushering in the world's first and only key exchange infrastructure based on symmetric techniques that can provide high assurance exchange of key material for global ICT security systems with millions to potentially billions of users; until recently, this was the exclusive domain of public key (asymmetric key) techniques.

Synaptic range of key exchange protocols have the following common features:

  • their cryptographic security is based on the underlying security of the block ciphers, stream ciphers and hash functions used to implement the protocol as recommended by ARDA. The use of symmetric cryptographic techniques offers higher levels of security against the threat of code-breaking quantum computers
  • they can take advantage of well studied U.S. government standards based cryptographic algorithms such as the NIST AES-256 cipher for privacy and NIST SHA-384 hash function to achieve a 30 year security rating
  • they are suitable for long lived infrastructure applications that require a 100 year security rating when running the NIST SHA-512 for authenticated encryption operations
  • they run efficiently in very low cost devices that cannot support the overhead of RSA like algorithms
  • they can protect mainstream asymmetric key exchange operations against attackers by wrapping an additional layer of security around them
  • key material can be derived by combining the output of any of Synaptic Labs' range of key exchange operations with the output of any other key exchange technology (standards based public key, experimental next generation public key, quantum key distribution, trusted courier, and so on).
To learn more about Synaptic Labs' unique range of key exchanges click on a link above.
Last Updated on Thursday, 30 July 2009 07:41