NTRU Cryptosystems

About NTRU Cryptosystems

NTRU Cryptosystems was established in 1996 to commercialize a new class of public-key cryptography. The company was founded by mathematicians Jeffrey Hoffstein, Jill Pipher, and Joseph H. Silverman, who developed the core algorithm, alongside Daniel Lieman. The founders' deep background in number theory and mathematics was pivotal in creating the NTRU (an acronym for N-th degree Truncated polynomial Ring Units) cryptosystem, which emerged from their academic research.

The firm's business centered on developing and licensing security software and services built upon its proprietary NTRU algorithm suite. This technology represented a significant departure from established standards like RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC). Its primary offering, NTRUEncrypt, is a lattice-based cryptosystem, which grounds its security in the mathematical difficulty of the shortest vector problem within a lattice. This approach offers two major advantages: high-speed operations and resistance to attacks from quantum computers, a vulnerability in many conventional encryption systems. NTRU Cryptosystems targeted its solutions at application vendors, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and enterprises requiring robust platform security. The business model involved licensing its patented technology and providing middleware that enabled applications to access hardware-protected secure storage and cryptographic services.

A significant milestone in the company's history was its acquisition by Security Innovation, a software security corporation, in July 2009. This merger aimed to combine NTRU's expertise in hardware and embedded security with Security Innovation's software security solutions to offer more complete data protection. Following the acquisition, the NTRUEncrypt patent was eventually placed in the public domain in 2017, making the technology freely available for use and fostering its adoption in open-source projects.