Founded 1996 | ||
Ntru Cryptosystems, Inc. is a provider of embedded security solutions. It was founded in 1996 by Joseph H. Silverman, Jeffrey Hoffstein, Jill Pipher and Daniel Lieman, four mathematicians at Brown University. In 2009, the company was acquired by Security Innovation.
The name Ntru is short for N-th degree truncated polynomial ring, or in mathematical notation
which is the underlying ring in which the cryptosystem works. The base ring R is taken to be the finite field
Ntru Cryptosystems developed and markets a Public-key cryptosystem. Ntru has focused on the embedded markets (e.g., cell Phones and RFID chips) where processing power is scarce. One of Ntru's competitors is RSA)
Ntru's Cryptosystem provides for both encryption and digital signature called NTRUEncrypt and NTRUSign respectively. Alternative definitions for the acronym "NTRU" are "Number Theorists aRe Us" and "Number Theory Research Unit".
NTRU is widely popular owing to its security against quantum computers (i.e. If they ever exist)