Rainbow retools for secure e-commerce

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January 26, 1998, Section:
TechWeb News

Rainbow retools for secure e-commerce
By Craig Matsumoto

San Francisco - Rainbow Technologies Inc. (Irvine, Calif.) has extended its cryptography hardware to work with the struggling Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) protocol, which credit-card companies are pushing as an encryption tool for electronic commerce.

The company was showing off its CryptoSwift card in PCI and Ethernet formats at the RSA Data Security Conference here last week. The card is built around a math coprocessor designed to speed up encryption algorithms, thus cutting transaction times on the Web by as much as half. The home-grown ASIC at the heart of the board was developed with data encryption in mind (see Sept. 8, 1997, page 14), unlike similar acceleration cards built on generic processors.

Aim is ubiquity

Rainbow primarily has sold CryptoSwift as an accelerator for Secure Socket Layer (SSL), the de facto encryption standard on the Web. But because its hardware can work with pretty much any standard-the only difference is in the math performed-the company wants to keep CryptoSwift in tune with every encryption standard that comes around. Setting up SET support is the first and most major step in developing that ubiquity.

On the business side, SET support gets CryptoSwift into the realm of banks and online brokerages, companies that last quarter helped deliver the first "sizable revenues" for CryptoSwift, said Shawn Abbott, chief scientist for Rainbow. Prior to that, the boards had shipped in the hundreds-reasonable, but not enough to make a mark in Rainbow's revenue picture.

Rainbow also announced alliances with companies that have developed CryptoSwift compatibility in prominent SET tools. RSA Data Security Inc. now includes CryptoSwift support in its S/Pay tool kit for SET transactions. The board is likewise supported by Verifone Inc.'s vPOS software for electronic merchants.

Troubled launch

SET is in its infancy and already in trouble. MasterCard International and Visa International jointly announced the standard early in 1996, expecting it to be a staple for online merchants as early as that Christmas. But technical delays and shrinking interest from online merchants have turned SET into a maybe for Christmas 1998.

"We have as many questions as anybody about the viability [of SET], but it was important for us to support all the tool kits," Abbott said. Some customers like the idea that if they do turn to SET, they'll be able to keep using their CryptoSwift hardware, he said.

Because SET isn't widely deployed, it's hard to tell what kind of performance improvements CryptoSwift can provide. SET's algorithm would need more help from CryptoSwift than SSL's, Abbott guesses, but no large SET installations are available for comparing results.

"It's all theoretical right now. There are no wide-scale deployments," he said.

Separately, behind the scenes Rainbow is preparing the second revision of its ASIC, tentatively named FastMAP. The chip is due for first silicon around the end of March and will lead to the production of faster CryptoSwift boards by the end of the year.