The demand for securing communications is increasing rapidly every day. Enterprises are fast adopting newer solutions to minimize the risks in electronic communications. The technology that has stood fast here is Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) offering a high level of security for web services, devices and individuals alike.

The digital identity of a web site and secure transfer of data to its users completely rest on a digital certificate hosted by that site and is a simple example of how thi technology has become a backbone for secure electronic communication. One company that has emerged as a strong PKI solution provider is Odyssey Technologies Limited. Odyssey, in early 2000, was the first to develop in-house competencies to compete against the global names in the public key technology. Ever since, it has been innovating security solutions to offer confidentiality, authentication,privacy and most of all simplicity, across cyberspace.

Over the years, Odyssey had introduced an innovative zero-touch deployment model for its Authentication server and has been constantly innovating in product architectures, high-performance PKI applications, and simpler interfaces. With such consistent efforts, the company has emerged as a PKI pioneer in the Asia-Pacific region. Odyssey intends to extend the Public Key usage into every corner of every enterprise creating a revolutionary model that will take it ahead of global competition.

In conversation with CIO Insider, Robert from Odyssey Technologies Limited talks in detail about the company’s offerings and its journey to success.

Elaborate on the areas that the company’s solutions portfolio built around Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is adding value to its customers.
Public Key Technology provides strong

confidentiality protection by way of encryption and the most perfect authentication mechanism by way of digital signatures. Much of the Odyssey’s product portfolio covers the expanse of digital signatures and their myriad uses in strong authentication & transaction authorization.

Today our products are used for secure logins to the bank and other web application accounts, authorizing bank transactions, digitally signing, and e-Distributing humongous volumes of account statements, card statements, and stock contract notes, for a large number of enterprise customers in the banking and stock-broking sectors. We have several products that address niche needs like format-specific document signing for customers to interact with NPCI and similar.

While we have developed significant competencies in encryption, it is a regulatory minefield to offer unfettered encryption capabilities to our customers. We consciously restrict our use of this to widely accepted areas like channel security and regulationstipulated products like the Data Vault that is used for safely storing Aadhaar numbers and other PII-like Card numbers.

What is the technological framework embedded in its product portfolio and what are the kinds of impacts they have been creating for customers?
Odyssey had embraced the PKI technology and focused on innovating in the implementation layer that gave our products tremendous speed and flexibility.

Unlike most application providers, we chose to build our applications using low-level primitives that gave us control over our portfolio and helped us to take sharp turns when the situation called for it. One among several examples will be the PDF creation, manipulation, and signature library we built. A direct benefit of this is the kind of co-signature models we could insert into the PDF document which no one else can offer today.

What are the greatest strengths of the company and how have its products and solutions made it a top preference among customers?
Our greatest strength is our competencies in PKI and our strict adherence to interoperable standards with a simultaneous willingness to build on the leading edge. One of our recent innovations helps users to get a digital

certificate directly into their cryptotoken without installing any token-specific software drivers. This application gives unparalleled mobility and convenience to the users and already a couple of large Certifying Authorities in India are adopting our solution. We have largely unified the usage of digital signatures across applications.

Considering Indian e-governance applications, people need different applications to sign their GST returns, Income Tax returns, PF statements, and so on. To add to these woes, each of these applications needs a different version of Java and stipulates a strict browser version as well. We offer a simple browser extension called ‘xorkeesignIndia G2C’ that does all of these on any recent browser on Windows, Mac, or Ubuntuand even on Android phones. This level of simplicity is unprecedented.

Asimilar simplicity has been brought into authentication where users can digitally sign their bank transactions even without digital certificates in a manner easier than OTP. By integrating this into smartphones and leveraging their native biometric authentication, Odyssey has brought layered protection to users and service providers.