Cryptography Research

This article is about the American company established in 1995. For a discussion on general research into cryptography, see History of cryptography.

Cryptography Research, Inc. was a San Francisco based cryptography company specializing in applied cryptographic engineering, including technologies for building tamper-resistant semiconductors. It was purchased on June 6, 2011, by Rambus for $342.5M and remained active as a subsidiary until 2015.^[1][2] The company licensed patents for protecting cryptographic devices against power analysis attacks.^[3] The company's CryptoFirewall-brand ASIC cores were used in pay TV conditional access systems and anti-counterfeiting applications.^[4] CRI also developed BD+, a security component in the Blu-ray disc format, and played a role in the format war between HD DVD and Blu-ray.^[5][6] The company's services group assisted with security testing, disaster recovery, and training.

Cryptography Research, Inc.

Company type	Private subsidiary
Founded	1995; 30 years ago (1995)
Headquarters	San Francisco, California
Key people	Paul Kocher, President and Chief Scientist
Products	Technology licensing, secure semiconductors
Revenue	$10M–$100M
Number of employees	25–100
Parent	Rambus
Website	rambus.com/security

Cryptography Research protected its core operations from outside attack by maintaining a secured local network that is not connected to the Internet at all. Employees who needed to work with sensitive data had two computers on their desks — one to access the secure network, and a separate computer to access the Internet.^[7]