Prote.US Converged Systems Corporation
Authentication with nothing to breach. Patented, cited by Visa, Mastercard, IBM, and 90+ others. Available for license.
The problem
Every authentication system in wide use today keeps the user's secrets in a central store — a password database, a certificate authority, a token vault. That store is the target. Breach it once and every user is compromised at once.
What Proteus patented
A different arrangement of standard public-key cryptography:
- The credential lives on the user's device, encrypted with a key the user never holds. The user carries their own data; nobody can read or alter it, including them.
- Every transaction re-keys the credential. After each successful authentication the credential is re-encrypted under a fresh key pair and pushed back to the device. A stolen credential dies the moment the real user transacts again — and if a thief uses it first, the real user's next attempt exposes the theft.
- The service proves itself before the user does. The credential app verifies the authenticating service with a token only the two of them share, so impostor endpoints get nothing.
- Strength scales with risk. Resource owners set a score threshold per resource; factors are verified one at a time until the threshold is met. A lab door and a wire transfer can demand different proof from the same credential.
- Any input is a factor. Password, PIN, fingerprint, spoken phrase, gesture — whatever the device can capture, the user can enroll.
The result is a credential with no central secret store to breach and no offline store to brute-force.
The portfolio
| US 9,332,018 | Method and system for secure authentication | Issued May 2016 · Active |
|---|---|---|
| US 9,967,261 | Method and system for secure authentication (continuation) | Issued May 2018 · Active |
| EP 3127275 B1 | Method and system for secure authentication | Granted January 2019 · Active in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom |
Priority date April 3, 2014. All three issued, in force, and assigned to Prote.US Converged Systems Corporation. All maintenance fees current.
Why it matters
Cited by more than 90 subsequent filings, including as examiner-cited prior art against applications from Intel, PayPal, Apple, Okta, Microsoft, and Capital One. Cited by Visa, Mastercard, IBM, Oracle, CyberArk, Workday, Samsung, Alibaba, and Bank of America.
Licensing
Proteus licenses this portfolio to organizations building authentication, credentialing, physical-access, and payment-authorization products.