Using its own proprietary cryptography algorithms and a chip that will soon arrive in consumer electronics devices, DeTron Inc. wants to become the first company to “meet the evolving global demands for cloud-based applications and services.” To do this, DeTron announced its Quantum Direct Key (QDK) product today, a chip that will arrive in a line of consumer electronics devices in Asia by Christmas and come to the U.S. in early 2013. The company hasn’t officially announced any partners yet and a spokesperson told me that the company is “currently working with commercializing partners and channel partners to help with distribution.”
According to DeTron, its QDK system provides users with better online protection than existing systems, because it offers them privacy, security, interoperability, and ease of use. Unlike cryptography schemes like OpenPGP that rely on a public-key infrastructure and require a third party, DeTron says its system will establish the public key encryption directly between the sender and recipient and certify the user’s identity. “Because the system requires only the sender and recipient, it simplifies and strengthens the exchange of information,” says DeTron.
The company hopes that users will soon be able to use its system for encrypting healthcare and financial records, but also for making email more secure. In addition, QDK could be used for enabling identity-based cryptography “for client-side security in Web applications, and public key encryption and signature generation in web browsers.” This, says DeTron, will enable faster and more secure digital purchases and enable better DRM solutions (something most of us are probably not looking forward to).
If you’re into this stuff, here is how DeTron describes the mechanics behind its system:
QDK functions by generating a pair of public and private keys from two public and secret seed matrices Mp (public) and Ms (secret). The KMC (Key Management Center) is the only owner of Ms and it is always offline. The private key is generated by the KMC from the user’s ID:
The public key is generated by any user using a known ID:
Mpand the key generation mapping gp(.) are distributed to the user after encryption.
DeTron’s founders are Steve Chao, who previously founded Qdero, a mobile development shop focused on the Chinese market, and Charles Yang. According to the company’s spokesperson, DeTron’s funding is primarily coming from an Asian gold mining company, but the company isn’t ready to disclose anything beyond this (including the name of the mining company).