NCipher and Core Street team on crypto

Cryptographic security company nCipher is teaming up with user credentialing startup CoreStreet Ltd. to sell technology that can supply digital credentials to millions of users over computer networks and disconnected "offline" environments, the companies announced Monday.

The deal will bundle CoreStreet's Real Time Credential Validation Authority (RTC VA) with nCipher's nShield hardware security module (HSM), providing better protection for the cryptographic keys that are used to validate digital certificates, the companies said.

CoreStreet's RTC VA is software that works with X.509 Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) deployments, allowing organizations to validate digital certificates in very large deployments of digital credentials. Technology developed by CoreStreet enables organizations to distribute lists of revoked certificates to hundreds of low-cost devices that, in turn, can validate certificates for hundreds of thousands or millions of certificate holders.

The CoreStreet technology promises to free PKI technology from networked environments and allow it to scale up to massive deployments, said Phil Libin, president of CoreStreet, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"PKI-based authentication is expensive and cumbersome. Both (CoreStreet and nCipher) are focused on ways to do authentication checks very quickly, in real time, from wherever you are at very little cost," Libin said.

Under the terms of the agreement, CoreStreet will sell nCipher's HSM hardware along with its software. nCipher will not be selling CoreStreet's products, according to Stu Vaeth, director of product marketing at nCipher, based in Cambridge, England.

"CoreStreet and nCipher have a set of tools that work together and have been tested, so its a low risk for customers," Libin said.

CoreStreet will continue to support HSMs made by other companies, Libin said.

The companies are hoping that the partnership will help encourage the adoption of both nCipher and CoreStreet technology, especially in vertical markets such as government and healthcare, where large scale deployments are common and where federal mandates set a high bar for security, Vaeth said.

With nCipher's nShield product, which is FIPS 140-2 level 3 certified, protecting cryptographic keys, CoreStreet's technology can be marketed to governments looking to deploy PKI validation to hundreds of thousands or millions of individual, for use in domestic security or with national ID cards, Libin said.

The companies said that the bundled product is available immediately. Pricing is still being worked out, however customers can expect a discount when buying the products bundled together, he said.