The Internet is Broken
You can tell that the Internet is broken because before you use it you have to do a lot of work to "fix" it. You have to tweak configuration settings on your computer, your pager, your cell phone, your PDA, and anything else you want to use with the Net. Before you can buy something online you have to type registration information information. Before you can send a file from one computer to another you have to set up and configure software on each one. To set up your internet-enabled cell phone you have to key in all of your old speed dial numbers, SMTP and POP3 server addresses, instant messenger settings, and at least twenty other things. Before you can read your mail on your new computer you need to find out your POP3 server address, SMTP server address, and perhaps figure out port settings, firewall configurations and maybe even proxy addresses and settings. You have to remember dozens of different usernames and their corresponding passwords. It's a mess.

To help address the mess, business executives have expensive IT teams to set it all up and keep it all working. Ordinary users have big and expensive technical support call centers they can ask for help...for every product they buy and every service they subscribe to.

It's only going to get worse. If you thought it was hard to get your PC configured, think a few years ahead when the prices have continued to drop. You can buy a laptop for $50, and fancy PDAs will be available in bubblepacks at K-Mart for $5. Imagine having to configure your cell phone, PDA, car computer, personal video recorder, video game console, stereo components, your second, third, and fourth computers, and those of your spouse, your kids, and your Mom. Imagine all of the services that you would want to use on each of these...email, instant messaging, telephony, file sharing, scheduling, Web browsing, online games, and purchasing items online. It's already more than the average person can comprehend. Before long it will be more than the average systems integration professional can effectively manage too.

The reason for this mess is that there's a missing abstraction layer (or at least part of one) in the OSI protocol stack. While there are numerous standard ways of delivering services to devices (using standard protocols like HTTP, POP3, and SMS) there are no standard ways for services and devices to discover one another. At AuthentiKey we are working to fix this by providing a standard way for people, services, and devices to understand one another.

The Components of the Solution
In order for people, services, and devices to "understand" one another (rather than simply connect to the Net) we will need:

A scalable and reliable mechanism for assigning names to people, devices, and services is needed. You can't look up information about someone or something without being able to identify them by a unique name.

A person, service, or device needs to be able to securely prove it is who it claims to be. Without that kind of trust there's no way to know who should be able to see what information.

Data about the people, devices, and services needs to be accessible in a standard and expandable format quickly and reliably anywhere in the world.

Who Can Do That?
Because of the special trust relationship that individual users and the providers of devices and services for the Internet it will take a special kind of company to provide a service that addresses this kind of need.

A company end users will trust not to abuse the confidential information they are holding, and to be a good steward of it, making it accessible to whoever the user wants, and not releasing it to anyone else.

A company that service providers will trust to not play favorites with the information they are holding.

A company with a highly secure and scalable system that will provide reliable and secure access to this critical information.

Microsoft seems to think this sounds like them. We don't think so.

Why AuthentiKey?

We believe in user ownership of data. In our design consumers own all the data about them. They can view, change, and delete it to their heart's content. We will be legally prohibited from selling the information, using it ourselves, and even if we wanted to we couldn't read the data anyway. The end users control all of their private keys. We won't even keep a copy of them (unless we are asked to).

We believe in avoiding direct competition with our customers. We will not compete with services that sell things, settle payments, store files, provide email, or anything else. We will maintain identities and settings information and that's it.

We believe that the way to build market share is to make it easy for developers to adopt our system (and therefore easy for end users to start using it).

We believe that strong public key encryption of each data element is the most secure way to maintain personal and device data (as opposed to to trying to keep a large database of unencrypted data (or one full of encrypted data whose keys we possess). This approach also has the pleasant side-effect of making caching of this data all over the world secure, efficient, and easier to use and maintain.

We help your products work smoothly and with minimum customer configuration. today to see what we can do for you.

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