Addressing one of the major worries about mushrooming growth of on-line traffic and commerce, AT&T Corp’s Bell Laboratories claims to have a comprehensive system for securing commercial information services, and is calling it the Information Vending Encryption System or IVES. The system is designed to protect services such as video-on-demand, home shopping and banking, software distribution, electronic publishing and electronic news and alerting services, and is equally applicable to the Internet, cable television networks and direct satellite broadcasting. The system requires chips jointly designed by AT&T Bell Laboratories and VLSI Technology Inc, and it will turn up first in set-top cable television boxes being built by AT&T as part of an end-to-end digital video system for Cablevision Systems Corp. The system was announced at a security conference held by encryption algorithm specialist RSA Data Security Inc in Redwood Shores, California. The chip, installed in television set-top boxes, co ntains a key for decoding otherwise useless video data streams, and tracks each time a customer clicks for a new programme and how much to charge and can also go into modems and CD-ROM players.
