we need to ensure that the ‘connected device’ is what it says it is,
explains Shamoon.
“We have a product offering that allows you to take any connected
“thing” and make sure it is what is says it is. It’s a certi cation of
authority that’s built for the IoT and it’s made for devices.”
Where public key infrastructure, with certi cates - like X5o9 - have
been designed for a world of millions of computers, they have not
really been designed for a world of trillions of devices.
“The world we are moving into is one where the baby camera is
going to wake up and say ‘Hey home gateway, I am a baby camera.’
That home gateway better know that it’s really a baby camera and
not some creep watching your kid,” Shamoon suggests.
Intertrust’s role in this rapidly changing world is to help
companies authenticate vast sensor networks and it has developed
a certi cate of authority that has generated billions of authenticated
personalities for devices.
“The other product we offer is application shielding and it’s an
algorithm that you run on an app – in a car, a glucose monitor,
wherever – that changes the instructions in the app so it is very hard
to reverse engineer.
“Hackers don’t usually attack encrypted data, that’s hard. They
will go to the end point of the system which is a device that is sitting
in a hostile environment and try to take it apart to steal the key. So
we have devised a technique that makes that harder to accomplish.”
Intertrust has also developed Modulus, a DRM product that
enables the user to create exchanges with distributed big data sets
in the cloud.
“The problem that we are looking to solve here is as more and
more companies start to store their information on premise or in
huge cloud data bases – they want more control over it.
TALAL SHAMOON
Talal G. Shamoon is a Silicon Valley executive,
computer scientist, entrepreneur, and investor. In
2003 he became the chief executive of Intertrust
Technologies. Starting in 1999, Shamoon has
been involved in the development of digital rights
management (DRM) technology which was fi rst
targeted to copyrights holders such as movie studios,
music labels and publishers. He is the chairman of the
developer community for the DRM technology Marlin
INTERVIEW TALAL SHAMOON
“The natural instinct is to lock the building up, but that’s no good
because the whole point of cloud computing is to allow you to keep
your data in a place that is scalable and shareable. But nobody
wants to put their data out there in a way that it can be reached,
so we have created a product that allows you to not only secure
distributed data, but share it, trade it and sell it.”
Modulus works by effectively letting you pick a favourite cloud or
data analytics provider. It acts as an additional layer in the cloud
– any cloud - and provides you with the ability to run analytics in
a secure way. It sits in the middle between one cloud base data
installation and another.
“In effect we are laying data rails between different distributed
cloud sets that will allow you to move and analyse data from point A
to point B, and then audit it and make sure the right things happen.
“We live in a society where different people specialise in different
things and we have networks of trusted relationships with different
people,” says Shamoon.
“What we are looking to provide is essentially ‘secure plumbing’
and advocating, with our products, that horizontal specialists work
together as a whole to provide the same values as a vertically
integrated company like Google.”
www.newelectronics.co.uk 10 September 2019 17
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