Greentech Media Recognizes Revere Security President in Top 100 List

Revere Security, a Dallas-based provider of cryptographic data security solutions for small, power-constrained chips and devices, has announced that its President and CEO Rick Stephenson has been recognized by the analysts at Greentech Media as one of the 100 most important people to know in the growing smart grid industry.

 

Greentech Media is an integrated online media company that delivers quality content in the industry, whether it is research, news or critical networking events. Recently, Revere Security was acknowledged in ‘Networked Grid 100’ for its influence on the market with capabilities to secure both future smart grid deployments and present installations. 

 

Nowadays, the smart grid has been steadily encompassing the residential and commercial markets in the form of smart utilities. Most of the modern smart grid operations transmit information about utilities usage from how much to when it’s used in a wireless mode via sensor networks.

 

In the future, these meters will be designed to talk wirelessly with the devices controlling appliances in the home in order to reap the ultimate goal of energy conservation. But at the same time, with expanding coverage of the networks, the devices used within them become more efficient but also more resource-constrained and difficult to secure, which makes them more vulnerable towards potential network breaches by unauthorized sources.

The encryption systems being used currently are too large and require too much power to be efficiently placed on microprocessors already in use. In order to make sure that information is secure and only available to the intended receiver, Revere Security’s Hummingbird algorithm plays an important role.

 

The Hummingbird algorithm is the only cryptographic solution that enables high-speed encryption in conjunction with automatic generation of a message authentication code or ‘MAC’. The algorithm has been collaboratively developed by an industry-renowned cryptographer, and Whitfield Diffie from Revere Security who had initiated the Diffie-Hellman protocol. After over 1,000 hours of rigorous study by former cryptanalysts from the National Security Agency (News - Alert), Hummingbird was found to show no vulnerabilities.

 

According to Stephenson, there’s an existing conflict between cost and performance when it comes to encrypting massive networks like smart grid systems, and with Hummingbird, the company is able to address that challenge head-on and offer an encryption solution that’s small enough, fast enough and secure enough to be the right fit for the smart grid market.

 

In December 2009, Revere Security cryptanalysts and RFID experts announced to engineer its flagship Hummingbird algorithm to alleviate the concerns about the security and privacy of the data being transmitted by the RFID wireless systems as well as the amount of power needed to ensure the security of these devices, and declared the algorithm to be the right fit for RFID systems, providing high levels of security, including secure identification and mutual authentication, with minimal impact on tag (News - Alert) performance.