CertCo

CertCo was a financial cryptography startup spun out of Bankers Trust in the 1990s. It had offices in New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts. It offered three main public key infrastructure (PKI) based products: an Identity Warranty system (tracking and insuring reliance on identity assertions in financial transactions); an electronic payment system (internally known as Acquire); and an Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) responder for validating X.509 public key certificates.

Early History

CertCo was founded in March 1994 by Frank Sudia and Peter Freund as an internal bank department known as BT Electronic Commerce (BTEC). It spun out in November 1996 as CertCo, LLC with a number of outside strategic and financial investors in a transaction managed by Goldman Sachs. (The LLC later converted to a corporation.)

Some of its better known early employees included Rich Ankney, Ed Appel, Alan Asay, Ernest Brickell, David Kravitz (inventor of the Digital Signature Algorithm), Yair Frankel, Dan Geer, C.T. Montgomery, Jay Simmons, Nanette Di Tosto, and Moti Yung.

Early on it licensed the "Fair Cryptosystem" key escrow patents of MIT Professor Silvio Micali and announced plans to implement a "Commercial Key Escrow System." However, the policy climate for key escrow turned negative [1], market interest waned, and the system was never built.

Technical Contributions

Patents for PKI technology are still being issued against applications filed by CertCo technical personnel, however some of its more important and/or heavily cited patents included:

   (list to be added after I recheck them)

Endgame

CertCo used up all of its money, never found a wide market for its products, and went out of business in Spring 2002, following substantial reductions in technical staff in November and December 2001.

Near the end of its life CertCo briefly achieved public notoriety by suing PayPal [2] for patent infringement, briefly delaying the latter's highly anticipated IPO. The dispute was reportedly settled for a nominal amount [3].