Wave Systems Corp. (fka WAVXQ)

[DooWopGuy]

Dabears – Here are a few connections:

The logos included Diebold, EDS, Mazda, Raytheon, and DISA.

(1) Diebold is, I believe, the leader ion both ATMs and direct recording (DRE) voting machines. In 2004, an ATM at Carnegie Mellon crashed and rebooted itself without loading the ATM software. As one observer noted, “The story is humorous until one realizes that Diebold is the leading producer of electronic voting machines.” More seriously, a trojan horse was installed in Diebold ATMs in Russia last March. This blog post by Daniel Sergile, discusses the incident and how the use of TPMs could be used to check for software changes and assure that the hardware has not been manipulated. His one concern is, “the central management of the device.” We may be able to suggest a solution.

This next URL links to an abstract of “TPM meets DRE: reducing the trust base for electronic voting using trusted platform modules,” in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Volume 4, Issue 4 (December 2009). The authors “reduce the required trusted computing base for direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines with a design based on trusted platform modules (TPMs). Our approach ensures election data integrity by binding the voter's choices with the presented ballot using a platform vote ballot (PVB) signature key managed by the TPM. The TPM can use the PVB key only when static measurements of the software reflect an uncompromised state and when a precinct judge enters a special password revealed on election day.” Diebold sold their voting systems unit to Election Systems & Software, Inc. last September, but the security concerns persist. The headline in CNNMoney .com read: “Diebold unloads voting machine albatross. The ATM maker says it expects to lose up to $55 million as a result of the sale of its voting machine subsidiary.”

Diebold has about 17,000 employees worldwide.

(2) EDS has had some relationship with Wave for several years. What is interesting in the logo context is that they entered an agreement last April to provide data center outsourcing services to Mazda Motor Europe. According to the announcement, “EDS will create and manage a standardized infrastructure as well as use best practices to improve stability and scalability of Mazda’s European technology environment… EDS also will provide enterprise security, maintenance and hardware provisioning for Mazda’s server and data storage environments.”

EDS, now HP Enterprise Services, had 137,000 employees when they were acquired by HP.

(3) DISI and Raytheon were discussed in the 2007 article, “Pentagon hones its procurement strategy “:

“[T]he Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is sponsoring a program called Net-Centric Enterprise Services, an effort to “make available the full range of collaboration tools such as instant messaging, chat, video conferencing and whiteboarding” for troops on the battlefield, said a DISA spokesman.

“Industry is working on joint solutions as well. In early May, Raytheon showed off its proposed Joint Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (Joint C3I) software, which puts together and broadcasts a common view of information from multiple sources…

“’We put together a single integrated picture, drawing from Army radars, Air Force sensors as well as Navy and missile defense systems. We can work across service boundaries to get connectivity,’ said Bill Kiczuk, Raytheon technical director. ‘This [Joint C3I] uses it all together so the war fighter does not have to correlate what he is seeing with what someone else is seeing. Now they have a common view of what’s happening.’

“DoD officials have expressed interest in Joint C3I and are in talks with Raytheon regarding developing the system, said Kiczuk.”

William Kiczuk has been named CTO at Raytheon, effective March 1st. Prior to the appointment, he was “technical director and director of strategic architectures.” Last May, he spoke at the 125th anniversary meeting of the IEEE, highlighting Project Athena and Raytheon’s new focus on cybersecurity.

Raytheon has 72,000 employees.

Among them, Diebold, EDS, and Raytheon have over 225,000 employees. How long will it be before each of those employees has a PC with self-encrypting drives and TPM that is managed by an ERAS server? Let’s see, three companies, 225,000 time $50 = $11.3 million. Oh, yeah, plus 90 cents per TPM brings us to $11.5 million.

It may take a while to roll out that hardware configuration to an entire global enterprise and it may never get to the farthest reaches, but this is the opportunity from three companies.

Just thinking,
DooWop