Cracking the codes

So you have now got 360,000 different interactions. This is just horrible, because one person can no longer understand it; one person can no longer even begin to debug it. So, then you try to assign groups of people to individual pieces of the problem. But a lot of people staring at different angles of the elephant often will miss the big picture.

In order to just handle this technical problem, what we often try to do is first simplify things. If you look at some of those things that we design, once you get your mind on what it is doing, it seems simple, compared to a lot of other things. That way, we can be more confident that we have not missed something.

Can you give us an overview of what Cryptography Research does?
Typically, our goal is to bring new technical approaches to solving really hard security problems. When you are dealing with any kind of new technology, if it backfires, there is a substantial risk. The ones that we have had the most success with have been with the security challenges of financial institutions like credit card organisations. Another area we are focusing on increasingly is piracy. We also do a lot of work with infrastructure wireless systems.

Most of our revenues are from technology licensing, but most of our time goes into services.

How bad is the privacy situation getting?
Privacy is going to become a bigger and bigger problem over time, because sensors and data collection capabilities are improving along with Moore's Law. People collect data but do not have any plan of how they are going to get rid of it or what they are going to do with it, and so you end up aggregating vast quantities of data. It is a huge privacy risk.

I can now record as much audio as I will ever experience in my entire life, and video will be there in just a few years. The chips to do location tracking are getting smaller and smaller. There is one in my cell phone. Anybody who knows what they are doing can know where I am. There is this notion that information is bad in aggregate -- but good in the cases where you need it. This is something that is very alien to a lot of people, and I am not sure how to solve it.

Piracy continues to be a huge, hot potato, with the studios blaming the device makers and the hardware makers trying to put responsibility on the studios.