Research and Development

Our interdisciplinary team of scientists and engineers converts its research results into innovative, market-ready solutions via product development or through our startup accelerators and ventures. Current areas of research include Big Data systems, targeted marketing and analytics, the Internet of Things, and bridging between offline and online worlds.


Current Research Areas

Governance and Trust for Big Data Systems

The only way that the Big Data economy will work is if people can trust the computations associated with the vast data sets that underlie them.  Success also involves solving the age-old problems of interoperability, authenticated access and security, this time cast against oceans of data.  We are developing a Trusted Big Data architecture for Big Data systems for DNA and associated healthcare information and also for the vast amounts of data generated by network-connected cars and appliances.

Privacy-driven Targeted Marketing and Analytics

The economic success of the current era of household-name Internet companies is based on user profiling and targeted advertising.  Unfortunately, their user’s privacy is often a victim of their business models.   We have discovered a way to allow highly precise targeted advertising that protects and preserves user data privacy. Furthermore, our data privacy architecture enables app developers, supply side platforms and ad networks to optimize targeting without depending on large platform providers, thereby generating more revenue for themselves – a win-win for marketing and advertising technology providers and consumer privacy alike.

Trust and Security for the Internet of Things

The dream of Internet connected everything is coming true, yet while the world tolerated computer viruses, malware and phishing attacks in the Windows-era, this is totally unacceptable in the age of connected infrastructure.  Digital terror, cyberattack and fraud levied against connected infrastructure would have horrifying consequences.  Securing and trusting everything from lighting to cars to appliances and beyond is a vast distributed secure systems problem.  We are leveraging our 25 years of inventions in distributed trusted computing to achieve IoT security and trust by securing everything from the fingertips of the Internet of Things to the infrastructure and big data systems that manage them, resulting in a secure, trusted and private connected devices.  Our research on IoT security is focused on solving a broad set of key problems in the areas of connected cars, trusted cities and infrastructure, transport, environmental controls, etc.

Bridging Between Offline and Online Worlds

Regardless of how connected things become, people will always be made of flesh and blood and the world will be made from atoms.  We are leading an effort that creates technologies that transduce physical world objects into digital images and back.  We are going beyond the traditional Internet of Things problem, to use commodity connected digital devices to privately and securely track and authenticate the delivery of goods through value chains, verify the integrity of physical objects including but not limited to pharmaceuticals and luxury goods to secure against counterfeiting. Using our offline-to-online secure system, and appropriately outfitted devices, a mother in Africa can verify the integrity of pill bottle for her child’s antibiotics, or a shopper in Hong Kong can use their phone to test that a watch they’re buying is not a fake. The same architecture allows developing countries to build affordable secure ticketing systems for their transport networks, using off the shelf devices and cloud infrastructure.


Intellectual Property

Intertrust holds fundamental patents on trusted computing and Digital Rights Management (DRM) that lie at the heart of modern secure systems, electronic commerce environments, and modern service-enabled devices. Our inventions talk to the fundamentals of systems that protect and manage digital information in connected cars, consumer media, healthcare, enterprise, education, government, smart grids and other next-generation distributed computing platforms.

A complete listing of Intertrust’s issued US patents is available from the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

We count many of the world’s great device manufacturers, service providers, and software platform providers among our licensees.
To request more information on licensing Intertrust’s patents or software, click here.


Publications

Intertrust’s technologists are active in the research community and often publish their results.