• "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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  • “Never underestimate the attention, risk, money and time that an opponent will put into reading traffic.”

    Robert Morris, former Chief Scientist of the US National Security Agency (NSA), National Computer Security Center, "Crypto '95 invited talks by R. Morris and A. Shamir", 1995

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  • "Today’s systems must anticipate future attacks. Any comprehensive system – whether for authenticated communications, secure data storage, or electronic commerce – is likely to remain in use for five years or more. It must be able to withstand the future: smarter attackers, more computational power, and greater incentives to subvert a widespread system. There won’t be time to upgrade it in the field."

    Bruce Schneier, "Why Cryptography Is Harder Than It Looks", 1997
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Home Technologies Digital signatures

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.

Digital signatures home

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