Voltage Security

Voltage Security was established in 2002 by Stanford University professor Dan Boneh along with three of his students, Matt Pauker, Guido Appenzeller, and Rishi Kacker. The company originated from their work at Stanford, focusing on Identity-Based Encryption (IBE), a cryptographic approach that simplifies public key management. One of the founders, Guido Appenzeller, noted that the initial hypothesis was that Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) would become a critical enterprise component, and IBE could offer a superior alternative. As the market evolved, the company adeptly repositioned its focus towards email and data-at-rest encryption. A significant milestone in the company's journey was its acquisition by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in February 2015, integrating it into HP's Atalla security division to bolster its data protection capabilities.

The company operates in the data security market, providing data-centric encryption and stateless key management solutions. Its business model centers on selling software and services to large enterprises across various sectors, including payments, banking, retail, insurance, healthcare, and government. Voltage's revenue is generated through the licensing of its software products and subscriptions to its cloud services. Before its acquisition, the venture-backed company had a strong focus on protecting payment data for large processors. Following the acquisition by HP, and subsequently by OpenText through its purchase of Micro Focus, Voltage's solutions are now part of a broader enterprise information management portfolio.

Voltage Security's core offering is a suite of products designed to protect sensitive data throughout its lifecycle, whether at rest, in motion, or in use. A key technology is Format-Preserving Encryption (FPE), which encrypts data while maintaining its original format, allowing it to be used in existing applications without modification. This is complemented by Identity-Based Encryption (IBE), which simplifies key management by using identities like email addresses as public keys. The product lineup includes Voltage SecureMail for end-to-end email encryption, Voltage SecureData for protecting data in databases and applications, Voltage SecureFile for file encryption, and Voltage Cloud Services. The firm also offers Secure Stateless Tokenization (SST) to protect payment card data, which helps clients reduce the scope of PCI-DSS compliance audits. These technologies are designed to integrate with a wide range of systems, from mainframes to mobile devices, and support modern environments like Hadoop and NoSQL databases.

Keywords: data encryption, format-preserving encryption, identity-based encryption, stateless key management, data protection, email security, payment security, tokenization, data-centric security, enterprise security