Price Waterhouse’s management consulting arm has signed an agreement to become the first international implementor of TriStrata Security’s Information Security Management System. This uses a rival technology to public key infrastructure-based cryptography systems from vendors such as Entrust and Zergo. Dr Alistair MacWillson, a partner in Price Waterhouse’s London office, says Internet commerce trials using the TriStrata system are underway with a large European bank and a telecoms operator. Price Waterhouse has opened testing and demonstration centers in London, Los Angeles, Menlo Park, New York and Zurich to market the system to its multinational clients. TriStrata was set up in Redwood Shores, California in 1996 by banking security expert Dr John Atalla whose Atalla Box security technology is used in 80% of the world’s automated teller machines. Its Information Security Management System is free of US government export controls on encryption technology as it uses the supposedly unbreakable Vernam cipher, also known as the one-time pad. This encrypts messages using randomly-generated numbers which are never replicated in the same sequence. TriStrata claims its system is five times cheaper to implement than public key infrastructures as it only needs three levels of certification authority as opposed to 15 on a PKI. The current version can handle 250,000 users from a standard server such as a Compaq Proline, with each server supporting over 1,000 transactions a second. A new version will shortly be released which is claimed to support up to 1 million users from a central server.
