44
STARTUP OF THE MONTH FEATURE NAME
Using simplicity to outsmart the bad guys
George Kanuck, vice president for sales and marketing at Trustonic, tells IBS Journal how the firm is one of the biggest security ventures you may have never heard of
Tell us about your company – how was it founded?
From around 2010, increasingly valuable services began to ‘go mobile’ and, as everyone knows, fraud follows money. Using software to protect software from software attacks can only get you so far; just look at anti-virus. To combat this, device makers and service providers recognised the need for hardware security in smartphones.
The leading chip architect, Arm Limited, had a technology that was of interest to banks, governments, Hollywood studios and a variety of others whose services were vulnerable to cyber attacks. These organisations thought the technology was great, but that it needed to be both accessible and in a critical mass of devices.
So, Trustonic was formed – we’re a joint venture between Arm and digital security specialists Gemalto – and, since then, we have been working to embed our security technology in as many devices as possible to enable banks and other service providers to better protect their services, data and customers. It’s gaining significant momentum, as we’ve been integrated by 17 of the top 20 Android device manufacturers, meaning that we’re in well over a billion devices worldwide.
What is your business model? For the financial services world, we work in a few ways:
1. The technology we embed into devices is called a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). This offers an isolated operating system within the device to store and remotely manage sensitive data, such as banking and payments apps, making them immune to all software threats.
George Kanuck: Tristonic is present in well over a billion devices worldwide
2. We enable the device itself to be identified and trusted, by injecting a Root of Trust. This is important for secure banking and financial services as it’s essential to authenticate both the device and the user.
3. Our technology also opens up other device functionality to the financial services community. For example, with the TEE you can ensure both the security of biometric user authentication and that the information displayed on screen or entered by the user cannot be intercepted by fraudsters.
www.ibsintelligence.com | © IBS Intelligence 2017
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52
