CIPHRA

ended

The story of data breaches across industries with national, regional, and often global impact is a never-ending one. The exposure of huge amounts of personal information and identities continues to be a major problem without a solution in sight (see sample on the left of recent breaches to tech giants). At the nexus of the world of cyber security and cyber-crime is the paramount issue of password and encryption key storage – the security measures in place to prevent hacking, and the capabilities of the illegal hackers to hack into storage sites and decipher encrypted messages.Authentico has invented CIPHRA which is a hardware dependent cryptographic processor that ensures that passwords and encryption keys are essentially impossible to steal even if a database is hacked into. CIPHRA protects the cryptographic infrastructure by securely processing passwords, and generating unclonable encryption keys from authentication requests using a technology called PUF (physically unclonable functions). Authentico´s solution stands to be a major alternative to traditional key storage methods. The keys are always present in the device, by generating the key on request. Information, such as password hashes, can be inputted, but never read out or extracted. Even weak passwords cannot be broken because the generated outputs are useless for an attacker and the database of encrypted and hashed passwords is useless without the key. This is a far better solution than current approaches because the company’s secret keys are never stored anywhere, at any time, making it extremely difficult for any malicious insider or outside hacker to ever gain access to them.