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Intellectual property: Our secret weapon in a crowded market

Technology
Intellectual property
21 SEPTEMBER 2017 - JOLETTE ROODT
The cybersecurity market is alive, and kicking ferociously. There are hundreds of security providers out there, all clamoring for your business and all claiming to be the best. When you’re constantly being bombarded with news of new attacks that you need to protect your customers against, the pressure can become overwhelming. How do you choose?


Standing out from the crowd


One of Entersekt’s key differentiators is that we own the patents to our authentication technology. We have just been granted two European patents, namely EPO Patent No. 2368339: Interactive transaction authentication and EPO Patent No. 2622786: Mobile handset identification and communication authentication, but we also have more than 50 other patents and patents pending, securing our intellectual property on almost every continent. Among the first patents that were granted to us were for our core technologies: Transakt and the emCert.

US 8,862,097: Secure Transaction Authentication (2008)

Entersekt’s Transakt product creates an isolated communication channel between a digital service provider and its user’s mobile device, avoiding reliance on the open Internet for user and transaction authentication. This second-factor, out-of-band channel counters all phishing, keylogging, and man-in-the-middle attacks. What’s more, it also frees end users from the hassle of  one-time passwords (OTPs) and other clumsy relics of identity verification. All the user has to do to accept or reject a transaction (initiated online or even on the same mobile) is to tap a button on receiving an authentication prompt on their phone or tablet.

US 8,707,029: Mobile Handset Identification and Communication Authentication (2010)

Our emCert (mobile certificate) uniquely identifies every mobile device enrolled with a digital service, and encrypts and decrypts communications between the device and the provider’s servers. This technology is also used to digitally sign the user’s authentication responses, supporting nonrepudiation.

Patent logic


Why would we spend time filing and maintaining patents if we could just claim that we do something? Because our intellectual property gives us a unique advantage in a crowded cybersecurity market. The fact that we have the patents to our technology means that our customers are guaranteed perpetual protection against infringement claims from other security vendors or, even worse, from patent trolls. These entities buy patents for as little as $1, then use them to extract settlements from well-funded (often tech) companies, who find it faster and cheaper to just pay the trolls than to attempt to prove their own intellectual property. Patents also provide an objective appraisal of where Entersekt stands as an innovator in this growing market.

In 2008, our founders came up with the technology that Gartner now predicts will fill 80% of the authentication market by 2020 – and we have the papers to show for it. Can your security provider say the same?