Mobile devices are perhaps the fastest changing products in the consumer electronics arena. Iprova is working with many of the leading device manufacturers to create inventions that will make the next generation of products faster, more secure, better connected and easier to use than ever before.
Our work
We collaborated with a mobile device technology company that wanted us to create inventions that enhanced user privacy and security, taking advantage of emerging smartphone capabilities in novel ways. The work led to Iprova delivering over 30 disruptive privacy and user authentication inventions in just three months.
Many of those inventions resulted in patent applications, a number of which are already granted in the US. In addition, illustrating the broader relevance of those innovations, those granted patents (based on this and other campaigns) have been cited by blue-chip companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft.
Example invention
Public key cryptography (asymmetric cryptography) is commonly used to encrypt communications between two mobile devices for an increased level of security. For public key cryptography to work, a reliable way to fetch the public keys of a user is required. Unfortunately, this is not always available, for example when a device is not connected to the internet. Asymmetric cryptography algorithms can also need considerable processing power, thus shortening device battery life. To overcome these problems, Iprova invented a way of using the dendrite structures in the batteries commonly found in mobile devices to generate a secure key.
In the invention, the wireless charging circuit of one device is used to characterise the time variant metal dendrite lithium-ion battery structure both in the same device and another opposing and adjacent device, and vice-versa, thus creating a unique key which may then be used to securely encrypt future communications between the two devices. This hardware-based symmetric encryption method extends the coverage of secure communications and can improve battery life of both devices.
Patent:US10554396 (B2) Generating a key for a shared secret