November 20, 2001
Cloakware Corporation, makers of Tamper Resistant Software (TRS) technology for protecting software against tampering, reverse engineering and automated attacks, announced today immediate availability of Cloakware/Signature(TM), a secure password-replacement technology for applications on stylus-based PDAs and mobile devices.
Cloakware/Signature is a software development kit (SDK) that enables programmers targeting these devices to eliminate passwords as the user authentication mechanism for their applications.
According to leading analysts, the U.S. mobile workforce already exceeds 40 million members. Globally, the number of mobile devices in service in both enterprise and consumer applications is expected to continue growing at a tremendous rate.
Making mobile applications easier to use and more secure is critical. Cloakware/Signature addresses this need, by replacing passwords with secure and intuitive hand-written signatures to authenticate users to the mobile device itself, local client applications, memory contents, or supporting networks and remote applications.
Because passwords can be stolen or hacked with relative ease, they represent a significant security exposure, particularly on devices that are small and portable, and that can fall easily into the wrong hands. Because passwords can be lost or forgotten, they also contribute substantially to user support costs. Studies indicate as high as 70% of calls to IT Help Desks relate to the setting or resetting of user passwords. Cloakware/Signature overcomes these issues.
"Password proliferation continues today, despite much IT effort to control it," stated F.B. Fallah, President and CEO of Cloakware. "The emerging community of mobile computing and mobile commerce users are particularly impacted. Cloakware/Signature is designed to provide applications developers with a simple and secure way to eliminate this headache for their mobile customers. Making applications easier to use means their rate of adoption, and the growth in mobile computing overall, will occur that much faster."
Cloakware/Signature was developed in collaboration with Communications Intelligence Corporation (CIC) of Redwood Shores, CA (NASDAQ: CICI). CIC is the leading supplier of biometric signature verification technology for wireless Internet and e-commerce applications. Using mobile biometric software from CIC, Cloakware applied its patent-pending TRS technology to 'cloak' the application and all its critical data. Cloakware/TRS transforms code that might take a sophisticated hacker minutes to breach, into unique but functionally identical instances of the program that will take an attacker months or more to tamper with or reverse engineer. It is the only software product to do so. In this case, the result is an extremely secure, cloaked, sign-on application using hand-written signature verification to control access. User authentication is done directly on the wireless device, with no added hardware, overcoming privacy concerns surrounding the transmission and central processing or storage of biometric information.
"Cloakware has developed a unique and powerful security technology," stated Guido DiGregorio, CIC's President and CEO. "Teaming with them to cloak our biometric software was appealing, in that it created a new product with extremely strong defenses against code hacking. Security is of primary concern for everyone from corporations to individuals. This concern becomes particularly significant as we share more and more sensitive information in an increasingly mobile world."
Cloakware/Signature was in Beta trials this fall, with a range of OEM clients putting the software through its paces. Certicom Corporation (NASDAQ: CERT; TSE: CIC), a leading provider of information security software and services for mobile e-business, was one of the firms involved. They continue to work with Cloakware toward product alliances. The results of this work should be known over the coming quarter. Cloakware will be demonstrating Cloakware/Signature in the Certicom booth (# 218) at the Internet World Wireless West show in San Jose, December 3 - 6.
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