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30 Minute Interview
Dongles, eTokens and more
Aladdin has a slew of offerings to tackle piracy and security
threats. Shailendra Sahasrabudhe, Country Manager, India, Aladdin Knowledge
Systems talks to Kushal Shah about DRM, eTokens and his company's business
in India.
 Shades
of digital rights management
Digital rights management (DRM) has two different aspects. One is for the entertainment
industry for protecting movies, CDs, DVDs, and games and the other is for the
packaged software segment. The latter is what we deal with and not entertainment
DRM. Indian anti-piracy laws are getting stricter since companies are moving
from services to products and hence the need to protect IP is arising in this
country. We need to follow certain laws accepted by different bodies to protect
IP.
Protecting software through DRM
When you have a software application, you need to control its licensing. You
also need to control things such as who is using the software, how many times
the software is used and how much time the software is used for. To make it
more granular, software authors want to restrict the features in the free and
paid editions of their products. The goal is to control the feature offered
by the software according to the author or software company’s need and
that is what we do. We give them a hardware appliance for their software for
rights management. A dongle programs all this into a lock. Some companies still
uses a traditional software lock including some of the big companies and they
fall prey to piracy.
Many small vendors are using our products to protect software for HR, billing,
attendance, and CRM. We provide hardware security and licensing packages to
them. If big companies such as Microsoft tell us that they want to attach an
Aladdin token to every box of software that they want to sell, we can assure
them that the Indian piracy rate will come down to single digits. Using this,
we are not protecting products only at the end but we protect it throughout
the development lifecycle.
eToken
People need some kind of digital identity when they are doing online transactions.
This is usually a certificate issued by one of the five companies in India—TCS,
Encore, IDRTP, MTNL, or Sify. When they sell certificates, they should reside
in a secure, portable and encrypted form and that can be done using eTokens.
When you are performing complex transactions, user name and password security
features are not enough and you need another factor which is the certificate.
You connect, enter your user name and password and then you connect the token
which verifies the credentials of your certificate and only after this process
are you allowed to access the site. Once you remove the token, you will be thrown
out of the Web site. If you compare this with some of the technologies which
HSBC offers, they are very elementary technologies. They have something called
as a ‘one time password’ which is used only to enter the system after
which you can perform all the activities and which is risky. With eTokens, you
have to keep the token plugged into the machine for as long as you are working.
It is assumed that new Basel laws will make it mandatory to use PKI based technology
as part of security.
Business in India
We focus more on small and medium customers and have more than 400 customers
in India. Companies such as NDS, PWC and Flash Networks are already using our
products. Indian companies are still evaluating eTokens as PKI-based technologies
are new to India. We have customers such as the Consortium for Indian Information
Technology Education (CIITE) which is linked with 8,000 different government
institutions. They are using this for students to protect their identity and
to restrict access to courses. On the banking front, banks such as Punjab National
Bank are using authentication applications for real-time gross settlement and
money transfer between branches. In next two years you will see eTokens being
used in front-end banking. We are partnering with various companies to grow
in India. We have recently partnered with Secure Synergy to help SMEs in their
e-mail management by providing them support for activities such as spam filtering
and phishing control. We are looking at India as not only from the sales perspective.
Looking at the way the Indian government is taking the concept of digital signatures,
we think there is enormous scope with all the tax procedures making it mandatory
to use digital signatures for e-filing. [Editor’s Note: While the government
of India encourages the use of digital signatures for e-filing it is possible
to do so without one though this involves footing it to a notified post office
for handing in a hard copy receipt.]
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