NTRU Cryptosystems, Inc.

Ntru Cryptosystems, Inc. is a provider of embedded security solutions. It was founded in 1996 by Joseph H. Silverman, Jeffrey Hoffstein, Jill Pipher and Daniel Lieman, four mathematicians at Brown University. In 2009, the company was acquired by Security Innovation -- a software security company.^[1]

The name Ntru is short for N-th degree truncated polynomial ring, or in mathematical notation

R[x] / (x^N − 1)

which is the underlying ring in which the cryptosystem works. The base ring R is taken to be the finite field $\mathbb{Z}/p\mathbb{Z}$. A detailed description of the encryption can be found in the NTRUEncrypt page.

Ntru Cryptosystems has developed and markets a Public-key cryptosystem. Ntru appears to be much faster than its major competitors (namely RSA), and consequently has focused on the embedded markets (e.g., cell Phones and RFID chips) where processing power is scarcer.

As is often the case with cryptographic algorithms, slight modifications allow both encryption and digital signature. In the Ntru Cryptosystem, these are called NTRUEncrypt and NTRUSign respectively. Alternative definitions for the acronym "NTRU" are "Number Theorists aRe Us" and "Number Theory Research Unit".^[2]

References

1. ^ Security Innovation acquires NTRU Cryptosystems, a leading security solutions provider to the embedded security market
2. ^ Janet Kerlin (2007-03-23). "Three Brown mathematicians build encryption system" (in English). http://www.brown.edu/Administration/George_Street_Journal/vol25/25GSJ01e.html. 

External links

• Home page — includes information about the algorithms, and gives up-to-date information about peer reviews that they have received.