By Allan Maurer

SILVER SPRINGS, MD—In today’s world, governments, healthcare, and financial institutions need secure ways to both identify people and to grant authorization to sites, buildings, offices and networks and to protect those networks. SETECS is seeking venture funding to ramp up its sales of security products meeting those convergent needs and to develop others.

Mark Heffernan, VP of finance and administration tells TechJournal South, “There is a convergence of identity management and access management needs.”

Founded in 2004, the company is really the second generation of a firm initially formed in Sweden folded into SETECS. “Essentially the technology is very mature,” says Hefferman.

In addition to funding by the owners, SETECS landed a $100,000 SBIR grant from the Department of Energy, a $75,000 grant from Maryland’s TEDCO, and $50,000 from Montgomery County, MD. The four-person company is currently housed at the Montgomery County incubator. It expects to be moving in about a year, but plans on staying in the area.

It is seeking from $2 million to $3 million to go after large market opportunities and to support development of new products, all of which have to validated by the National Institutes of Standards, a process that can cost $50,000 to $75,000 per product.

Current product suite
In three and a half years, the company has done about a million in sales of its products. They currently include:

OneCARD is a middleware system supporting multiple types of smart–cards, including secret–key cryptography, public–key cryptography, file system, and Java smart cards. The system provides smart cards administration and multiple smart card applications (applets). It supports enhanced multiple security applications and is integrated with SETECS OneManager and OnePKI products.

OneGroup is a family of three secure group applications: secure instant messaging, secure whiteboard (forum), and secure sharing of documents within a group. Sharing of documents is based on Web services and security for that application is provided. All three secure group applications may be used across multiple domains. Group authorizations are based on identities and roles of users.

OnePKI is a global public–key infrastructure comprising four types of Certificate Authority (CA) servers: Top (Root) Server, Policy CA Server, Hierarchical CA Server, and Local CA Server. OnePKI servers provide certification functions in local environments and also in a global and open network.

OneNET is a system for secure Web services, secure E–mail, and secure mobile applications. It provides strong, end–to–end protection of HTML documents, WWW forms, E–mail letters and communication messages. In addition, it performs authentication and authorization of users and security administrators.

Security Framework is a framework for rapid development and run–time support for security enabled network applications. It contains ready–made components for most of the security functions, operations, and protocols needed by any network security application: registration of users and servers, certification, smart cards administration, configuration management and audit logs.

Exploring non-traditional smart-card uses
SETECS CEO and CTO Sead Muftic says the company is exploring a number of non-traditional uses for its smart card technology. “The card is flexible. You can add components to expand it. We’re looking at document management and other applications.”

Hefferman notes, “We’re pursuing a number of markets, the federal government one of the biggest.” He points out that the government has several programs to establish higher standards for identity verification.
The company is also selling to the financial/banking sector. It’s looking at the transportation sector as well.

“We see real growth in the commercial healthcare and financial markets,” he says. “We see the government market as initial validation, demonstrating the utility and applicability of the products.” The government, by mandating a unitary set of standards, “Set the stage for growth,” he adds.

“They’re all multi-billion dollar markets.”

Sead says that a recent University of Virginia academic study suggesting that smart cards may be hacked is “not a real threat.” Smart Cards he says have three layers of security. “Something you are…a fingerprint or other biometric; something you know, a password, and something you have, such as a card. Without all three, you really can’t do much. This is very strong and reliably secure technology, period.”

On the Web: www.setecs.com

Southeast Venture Conference, February 29 – March 1, 2012 at the Ritz Carlton in Tysons Corner, VA – Where Smart Money Meets Smart People.
www.seventure.org

© 2008, TechJournal South. All rights reserved.