A short introduction of TPVS

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A short introduction of TPVS
Who we are and what we are doing.

TPVS Mission UPE Policies Research References Financials Competitors IST Development

TPVS is a privately owned highly innovative seed-stage research and development start-up in Budapest and Szeged, Hungary. TPVS is the sole inventor and owner of the probably revolutionary universal program encryption (UPE) and some related more traditional encryption technology. (Techniques – at least in their goal – similar to UPE are sometimes called “program obfuscation”, “code obfuscation”, “tamper-resistant software”, “tamper-proof software” etc.) We have a network of about 20 researchers and programmers, who work on a project to project basis, due to the ever changing demand on the market for our products and services. About 3-4 of them is regarded as being among the best 1% in the profession in Hungary, while all the others are in the top 5%.

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Mission: Our mission is to develop and market core cryptographic solutions with special emphasis on exploiting the power and flexibility of the unique UPE technology. TPVS is strongly committed to protect privacy, software integrity and intellectual property in cyberspace.

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What is UPE: UPE is a new program encryption (code obfuscation) technology based on a mathematical breakthrough in cryptography. It can hide any structure in a program by making it totally incomprehensible so the inner workings of a program can be hidden completely from prying eyes. UPE is the first technology that makes digital piracy, software manipulation and reverse engineering provably impossible without special hardware.

The major problem with program encryption – unlike text encryption – is that every algorithm needs a serious revision and rethinking before encrypting it so as not to leak information. Most algorithms are not devised or studied from this point of view. This is not the weakness of UPE technology, it has to be the nature of any program encryption technology because of mathematical necessity. Furthermore, there are algorithms which – in principle – leak information in any circumstances, whether encrypted or not. Because of this phenomena we also have to study the complete system individually and prove its security in its particular implementation.

Despite these difficulties, a lot of things can be done with UPE which were not possible before. Basically, we can add new and sometimies vital functions to almost any IT solutions by making it or some of its modules tamper-proof.

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Policies: We always customize our technology to the special needs of our customers which usually results in joint development projects in different fields, like e-banking, e-commerce, e-government. Our strength is different levels of copy protection, structured content accessibility control, blinded database management, secure digital signatures, trust management, etc.

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Research: Our major and probably the most ambitious research project is to encrypt the open source LEON SPARC chip of the European Space Agency (ESA). (About LEON you can find info at www.gaisler.com.) If finished, this would make program encryption automatic. We implement the encrypted chip on hardware (FPGA – Field Programmable Gate Arrays), so it can be tested for implementing in silicon. Its major application would be secure e- and m-commerce solutions on the Internet or in mobile phones, smart cards and other embedded systems.

Our other major research project – which unfortunately (so far at least) did not receieve support in Hungary – is a compelete bookkeeping system to prevent consumption tax evasion and money loundering, which is – if you read the recent news – one of the most pressing issues of our society.

Our e- and m-commerce solutions may solve one of the major contradiction in cyberspace, namely the demand for both privacy, personalized marketing and a secure payment and commitment system.

Using a new kind of public key encryption technology closely related to our core UPE technology, we have a secure digital signature and encryption technology for the mass market. By making the digital signature software tamper-proof, this prevents a simple, otherwise indefensible attack – namely the hidden modification of the signature software – on all recent digital signature scheme.

References: Due to the nature of our trade, we strictly keep the confidentiality of our customers. Despite this confidentality, the following companies agreed to be included here as references: New Age Software Kft, Nanosoft Kft, SZÉ-RA Kft, Medianovadata Kft, EUsoft Kft, Medianova OEG, Gaia Multimédia Stúdió, Gaia Film Kft, ConCard Kft, STAF Kft, FAL-CON Kft.

Financials: Despite beeing a start-up and the huge technology and product development costs, TPVS is profitable and financially stable from its first day of existence. We achieve this by balancing the budget of our major long term research and developement activities with other immediately profitable ones.

Competitors: Our maximally secure provably unbreakable UPE technology so far does not have any competition. Several similar attempt were made, for example www.cloakware.com. But all of these code obfuscation technologies – as it is readily acknowledged by their developers – can be broken by serious players, like a determined group of experts / hackers, big corporations, the mob, or national security services. So they provide only a limited security, which is of course may be useful in some cases, but makes them useless – even dangerous, by providing a false sense of security – if the stakes are really high.

Why IST: Despite being able to develope the UPE technology, being profitable and having a small but stable customer base, we are not satisfied, because we believe that the UPE technology has a much bigger potential. This is one of the reasons why we try to find partners for other projects.

The suggested projects are thoroughly studied both from technology and business point of view. But they are not or only partially carried out because so far we did not find suitable business partners, sources of funding or comitted wold be customers.

Development pahse: So far, we concentrated mainly on our core expertise, and developed ideas and technologies, not end products. But we are very much aware of that in our business environment end customers want complete solutions. But security has to be planned from the very beginning, not as an afterthought, so we have to be there from the start of the project. At our present stage of development we cannot change this major shortcoming.

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