Safe at Any Speed

Speed and safety are completely at odds with one another. Speed demands recklessness and feelings of invulnerability; safety requires deliberation, careful planning and an acceptance of human frailty. Speed is about living fast, dying young and leaving behind a beautiful corpse. Safety is about looking both ways before crossing the street and chewing each bite of food 35 times so you don't choke.

While speed and safety are at the opposite ends of the spectrum, they are also at the opposite ends of Tony Fascenda's career in wireless. After making his name and fortune developing real-time driver data for the Formula One racing circuit, Fascenda helped others make their own names and fortunes with a real-time financial information service that presaged the mobile data revolution by almost a generation.

Now, however, Fascenda literally is playing it safe: His latest venture, Bethesda, Md.-based KoolSpan, promises security, authentication and remote access that's cheap, easy to use and interoperable with all wireless and wired network standards.

KoolSpan's SecureEdge solution operates on a patent-pending system that capitalizes on the same smart card technology found in hundreds of millions of GSM handsets across the world. Via smart cards, SecureEdge automatically authenticates the user, not the computer. As a result, there is no infrastructure and no back-end servers — authentication takes place quickly and simply at the edge of the network, and remote access is possible from nearly anywhere.

“People think that unless it's complex, technology is not going to work,” said Fascenda, KoolSpan's cofounder, CEO, CTO and chairman. “Complex technology is easy to do. Simple technology is really hard.”

Fascenda got his start in wireless during the late 1970s while earning his master's degree from Penn State University. “I had been utterly fascinated by Formula One, and I noticed that if you could score fourth or higher in every race, you could lock up the world championship,” he recalled. “I said, ‘What is it you need to know to consistently finish fourth or higher?’ A lot of drivers crash or burn out or their cars fail. I thought if you had real accurate data as to where you were and what all the trends were, you would know what position you would have to run to end up in fourth.”

Fascenda discovered there was no existing source for real-time driver data, so for his master's thesis he developed his own timing and scoring system using transmitters attached to the racecars, a piece of aluminum tape glued to the start/finish line and a receiver connected to the end of the tape to register impulses as the cars passed by. Not only did drivers and their pit crews receive the information, but to generate revenue, Fascenda also envisioned handheld wireless data devices to sell to the spectators populating the grandstand.

Even with cars traveling at more than 200 miles per hour, Fascenda's system proved accurate to a thousandth of a second. The Tag Heuer watch company — then the sponsors of Ferrari and the official timekeepers of the Formula One circuit — soon came calling. “They had been developing their own transceiver that would report the car's position on the track to use for timing and scoring,” Fascenda said. “Their device was 80 pounds. Mine was eight ounces.” Tag Heuer licensed the technology within weeks, immediately selling the license to rival watchmaker Longines, which in turn introduced it as the official timing system for Formula One and later the Indy and CART circuits.

From there Fascenda founded Dataspeed, adapting his technology to deliver financial information. “People asked, ‘Could you use this for real-time stock quotes?’ I said, ‘Sure — what difference does it make? Data's data.’” Dubbed QuoTrek and still used today under the Signal brand, the financial data service operates on FM subcarriers that piggyback on top of the main FM radio frequencies. QuoTrek data originates directly from the stock exchanges themselves. “We were streaming quotes before the term ‘streaming’ even existed,” Fascenda said. “It was one of the first true wireless products.”

The problem was that piggybacking on FM radio channels was expensive. “We were spending $10,000 a month per market, and the only thing we could sell was a very high-value, expensive monthly service to small number of people,” Fascenda said. “I wanted to develop wireless technologies in a more broad-brush, lower-cost, mass-market approach, and felt the way to do that was drive airtime costs down. I looked at doing the technology on a paging channel — if it's paging, you don't have to own the channel. You're only paying for the cost of packets you transmit.”

And because during the mid-1980s there were no handheld wireless data receivers on the market, Fascenda built his own, forming Newspager Corporation of America to develop a software-based information management system that could run on top of a wireless medium. Introduced by Uniden in 1988, the Newspager service generated $14.8 million in licensing revenues over the next three years. Motorola acquired the company in 1997.

After a stint at Mobeo, which delivered foreign exchange market information to traders via pagers, Fascenda retired in 2001. But while setting up a home wireless network, he became intrigued by the growing problem of wireless security.

“I thought, why don't they use smart cards? They're used in 650 million phones around the world as the basis for authentication and security,” Fascenda said. “The Wi-Fi people were chasing the problem with either external boxes on the network or complicated servers or software clients that could be copied. Smart cards are secure, tamper-resistant devices immune to those kinds of problems. It made perfect sense.”

The basic idea behind SecureEdge is that while one smart card identifies the user, a second smart card on the network mutually authenticates the user with the network. Both sides essentially authenticate the other at the same time, and there are no server requirements — security and authentication are delegated to the edge of the network.

“The problem is this whole [alphabet soup] of 802.11 standards, and all this Wi-Fi-certified gear that you have a hard time figuring out what it will interoperate with,” Fascenda said. “The standards are different from one year to the next, and depending on the mix of products, you may or may not have a secure network. With our approach, regardless of anything, you have encryption across the link and bulletproof, token-based authentication in both directions.”

Fascenda said that rival security protocols demand that each time users connect to the network, regardless of where they connects from, they must go back to the same authentication server that gave them access rights in the first place. KoolSpan's approach is to store users' network rights directly in their smart cards, so wherever they go, all they have to do is authenticate to an edge device. SecureEdge can also identify, authenticate and generate session keys on the network side, and identify an unlimited number of users.

“This gets around a lot of the issues in wireless security — you actually wake up secure,” Fascenda said. “In most technologies, you authenticate in the clear-in and then establish security. In our technology, you never exchange keys. In fact, the keys aren't even known. They're inside the smart cards and never come out under any conditions. They can't even be read from the smart cards once they're generated.”

SecureEdge operates on the guiding principle that technology must be made simple: “When you try to solve a problem, you have to look at it from where the customer is and ask what makes sense for the user,” Fascenda said. “You want to make it easy for the end user, not the engineer.”

Fascenda's sentiments echo a growing trend in the wireless networking space: At the recent NetWorld+Interop trade event in Las Vegas, much of the discussion centered on making wireless access not just more secure, but more simple in the process.

“We need to educate the enterprise on the value of wireless,” said Asa Holmstrom, president of wireless security software developer Columbitech. “Much of the public still thinks wireless networks are unsafe. They don't see the ROI or calculate how much more money you make by making users mobile. To be successful, we must make our products simple to use.”

KoolSpan is currently in its final set of beta tests in a half-dozen sites, with plans to launch SecureEdge commercially by the end of the current quarter. Fascenda would not name any of the companies currently testing the product, saying only that one large, well-known organization is using it right now. He said there's also significant interest from health-care organizations and — proving everything comes full-circle — from the automotive industry.

KoolSpan has also earned the attention of the U.S. government, in large part because SecureEdge has been certified in compliance with the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) code, a standardized set of numeric or alphabetic codes created by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

“There are only a couple of wireless solutions with FIPS certification,” Fascenda said. “We're starting with a FIPS-approved token on both sides of the network. That's all taken KoolSpan a bit longer than normal to get things right.”

Proof positive that speed and safety are on separate tracks.