CertCo


CertCo, Inc., was a financial cryptography startup spun out of Bankers Trust in the 1990s. The company pioneered a risk management approach to cryptographic services. It had offices in New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts. It offered three main public key infrastructure based products: an Identity Warranty system ; an electronic payment system ; and an Online Certificate Status Protocol responder for validating X.509 public key certificates. It went out of business in Spring 2002 never having found a wide market for its products despite filing a number of patents and developing new technology.

History

Early history

CertCo was founded in March 1994 by Frank Sudia and Peter Freund as an internal bank department known as BT Electronic Commerce. It spun out in November 1996 as CertCo with a number of outside strategic and financial investors in a transaction managed by Goldman Sachs.
Some of its better known early employees included Rich Ankney, Ed Appel, Alan Asay, Ernest Brickell, David Kravitz, Yair Frankel, Dan Geer, C.T. Montgomery, Jay Simmons, Nanette Di Tosto, Paul Turner, Mark Jefferson and Moti Yung.
Early on it licensed the "Fair Cryptosystem" key escrow patents of MIT Professor Silvio Micali and announced plans to implement a "Commercial Key Escrow System". Thereafter the policy climate for key escrow turned negative, market interest waned, and the system was never built.

Vision

CertCo and Bankers Trust promoted the creation of a bank consortium to serve as a PKI certificate authority for global commerce, leading to the 1999 launch of Identrus, later renamed Identrust. The banks, however, declined to license CertCo's technology, opting instead for a vendor-neutral approach. Unlike the vendor-neutral approach, Certco promoted a risk management approach to PKI with transaction level insurance, and pioneered novel visionary approach to authentication in the financial sector: First, a distributed proactively secured certificate authority was designed and built. Currently, practice employing U2F devices employs such strong authentication measures at the user side.
CertCo's most notable commercial customer was SETCo, the operating company for the Visa-MasterCard Secure electronic transaction credit card security protocol, to which it provided certificate authority technology, which was the first implementation of distributed Threshold cryptography based signing. Currently, Threshold Cryptography is widely employed, say in the Cryptocurrency exchange ecosystem.

Business failure

Despite developing new technology, CertCo did not find a wide market for its products, and went out of business in Spring 2002, following substantial reductions in technical staff in November and December 2001, due, partially, to unavailability of investors after the September 11 attacks.

Technical contributions

CertCo made various contributions to the fields of cryptography and public key infrastructure via scientific publications and patents. Its most heavily cited patents by subject are:
Other patent filings include

Standards and policy

CertCo personnel contributed to a number of standards bodies and policy projects, including: