Cryptography Research wins legal battle against Visa and licensees begin to sign

by Chris Corum, Executive Editor

I met Kit Rodgers from Cryptography Research in 2004 when his company announced its intent to license the countermeasures that protect smart card chips from a specific attack called Differential Power Analysis (DPA). He passionately argued that it was time for the chip and card manufacturers to pay up for the security measures his colleagues had developed in the late 1990s. Indeed the patents had just recently been issued and Cryptography Research was preparing itself for battle.

As I wrote my initial article on the topic, A new license fee for every smart card? January 2005, I was pessimistic of their chances to prevail. It seemed to me like David vs. Goliath and Goliath and Goliath and Goliath … a relatively small San Francisco-based team of mathematicians and electrical engineers were going to convince the card associations, the semiconductor industry, card manufacturers and maybe even end issuers that they should send them money every time they made a smart card. Sure they were.