Settling with Visa
So what happens when you go to battle with Visa? Well, if you’re Cryptography Research it’s just a regular day at the office. When you have strong patent protection, you will always have a solid position in the marketplace. A great illustration of this happened this week when Cryptography Research signed a definitive agreement settling its litigation against Visa, under which Visa will become a licensee of Cryptography Research’s patent portfolio covering countermeasures to Differential Power Analysis (DPA). The license fee and other settlement terms are confidential per the agreement.
So what is DPA? Differential power analysis is a side-channel attack which involves statistically analyzing power consumption measurements from a cryptosystem. The attack exploits biases varying power consumption of microprocessors or other hardware while performing operations using secret keys. DPA attacks have signal processing and error correction properties which can extract secrets from measurements which contain too much noise to be analyzed using simple power analysis. Using DPA, an adversary can obtain secret keys by analyzing power consumption measurements from multiple cryptographic operations performed by a vulnerable smart card or other device.[1]
“We are happy to add the world’s largest payment system to our growing list of DPA licensees,” said Paul Kocher, president and chief scientist at Cryptography Research. “Following the recent announcements of signed agreements with Infineon and Renesas, it is clear that the major players at all levels of the smart card industry are recognizing the value and importance of CRI’s DPA technology and the strength of our intellectual property in the area of tamper-resistant semiconductors.”
