GTE & Cylink Team On Encryption For ATM Washington, D.C., 31 January 1996 -- During a press conference last night at Comnet, GTE and Cylink unveiled InfoGuard 100, a jointly developed offering billed as the first encryption system able to work with ATM (asynchronous transfer mode). InfoGuard 100 is meant to provide the security needed to induce business and government to use ATM public networks, said Michael M. Guzelian, GTE's marketing director for broadband systems, speaking at the press conference. GTE is the number one provider of encryption to the federal government, while Cylink holds a 70 percent share of the commercial encryption market, according to Kamy Kavianian, senior product marketing manager at Cylink for SecureWAN. GTE and Cylink will also jointly market the new ATM encryption system. "The deal (for InfoGuard 100) is mutually exclusive, but we don't know anyone else who can do it," noted Jeff Callo, Cylink's director of business development. InfoGuard consists of two main components, according to the officials. An ATM adapter from GTE provides ATM interfaces and cell processing and control functions. Cylink's CIDEC-VHS contributes "high-speed data encryption and decryption," in addition to physical security and "full automated key functions." Kavianian told the journalists that InfoGuard 100 is based on DES encryption. Users of InfoGuard will foil "key exhaustion," a method used for breaking encryption codes, if they "change their codes frequently," Guzelian added. Essentially, CIDEC-VHS has turned out to be "the first encryption method fast enough to keep up with ATM," Guzelian maintained. The agreement between Cylink and GTE represents "an excellent example of coopetition," Callo said. --