Intertrust has confessed to us once or twice that its whiteCryption products are included in a number of partner products, such as those from Arxan and Inside Secure, which protect keys for content which is headed for portable devices such as tablets, usually within Apps.
So it’s not too surprising that it has now entered that market, albeit somewhat obliquely, suggesting that its source code obfuscation and whitebox cryptographic techniques can protect the source code of Apps themselves, as well as the content they deliver. Companies like Inside Secure, which bought the portable encryption business from Authentec, just after Apple bought the company, have done a lot of business with App vendors on the back of these techniques.
Inside Secure uses the Arxan toolset to harden its own DRM or Microsoft’s PlayReady against cryptographic key theft, and that in turn uses the Intertrust owned whitebox encryption, a set of mathematical transforms that prevent keys ever being seen in the clear within an operating system.
Now Intertrust has launched two products with the Cryptanium Brand, through its
whiteCryption Corp, which it says offers data and runtime code protection for software apps. It runs on iOS, Android, Windows, OSX and Linux and comes in two flavors Code Protection, which uses source code obfuscation, and Cryptanium Secure Keychain which uses the whitebox cryptographic techniques to keep encryption keys secret.
It points out that in 2010, whiteCryption acquired MCFACT technology and its related products from Syncrosoft. The same tools were licensed by Syncrosoft to Microsoft back in 2006.
Developers today write apps to run on a long list of platforms. These include smartphones, tablets, PCs, and just about any network-connected device. Nearly all of these devices use a handful of common operating systems, and apps that run on these devices are easy targets for hackers looking to extract private data, transaction keys, trade secrets and more. So Intertrust is aiming its Cryptanium products at all app developers, but as well as protecting their code, it will just as easily offer software only protection to content, and go up against the Inside Secure Product line.
Software only protection is always considered weaker than hardware based protection, but right now Apple and other chip vendors do not offer App developers hardware encryption assists within their chips like the smart cards offer in set tops.
Intertrust holds many of the basic patents for enacting DRM systems and has licensing deals with system vendors like Microsoft, as well as operators like Vodafone and Telefonica and offers its own DRM system called Marlin.