About Prime Factors

Prime Factors is a leader in applied data protection
committed to securing an open and collaborative digital world.

Global Footprint

Global Industries Served

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History

Prime Factors, a leader in data protection and encryption for nearly 40 years, was founded in 1981 in Berkeley, California. Our first electronic data encryption software solution based on the Data Encryption Standard (DES) was purchased by Chase Manhattan Bank, which began a series of sales to large banks in the New York metro area and established Prime Factors as a popular provider of encryption toolkits to the financial services industry.  In the same year as our founding, the first Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standard for the transportation, food, drug, warehouse, and banking industries (ANSI X12) was published. As new standards emerged, EDI began to replace paper as a medium for transmitting data between organizations. Prime Factors, in partnership with Premenos Technology Corporation and Harbinger Corporation, would become a leader in securing payments and other EDI transactions – helping global customers protect the sensitive data they exchanged with their trading partners around the world.

The company relocated to Eugene, Oregon, in 1984, and a business relationship with Visa International led to commercialization of the PIN Management System (PMS). PMS helped banks generate and verify the Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) and other security codes needed to create and process payment cards, without needing to manage the complicated underlying cryptographic algorithms necessary to protect against card counterfeiting. With Visa International as a channel partner, PMS initially rolled out to more than 30 banks across Central and South America and expanded across banks in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia Pacific. Nearly 17 years later, the PIN Management System evolved into the Bank Card Security System (BCSS), which added robust cryptographic payment key management along with other new features and functionality, including the ability to select software or hardware-based cryptography. BCSS eventually expanded into securing EMV chip card issuance and payments processing and the ability to provision IoT devices with secure credentials. More than 150 global financial institutions across six continents have turned to Prime Factors to help simplify payment security and adherence to the continuously evolving EMVCo and Global Card Scheme standards as well as PCI Standards, such as PIN Security, requiring integration with payment hardware security modules certified to FIPS140-2 to securely issue and process payment card transactions.

In 1988, Prime Factors developed an authentication software product based on the ANSI X9.9 Financial Institution Message Authentication cryptography standard for wholesale banking, which later evolved into the STK Toolkit – a cryptographic library for secure authentication and general data protection. Government bodies, large banks and global enterprises interwove STK Toolkit into their applications and infrastructure, leveraging the product’s strong encryption subroutines and utilities to protect sensitive information. In 2012, Prime Factors launched a fundamentally new approach to application level data protection, called EncryptRIGHT, which no longer required cryptography to be interwoven into applications. EncryptRIGHT’s unique Data Protection Policy (DPP) development tool helps InfoSec teams quickly, easily, and comprehensively define policies for how to secure and unsecure sensitive information. EncryptRIGHT leverages the strong cryptographic libraries of STK Toolkit along with robust encryption key management, role-based data access controls, and additional data protection features to consistently enforce these DPPs across any application, database, or dataset. EncryptRIGHT not only delivers ground-breaking approaches to data security, it also drastically simplifies the deployment of robust data protection at the application layer.

In recent years, the majority of data breaches have occurred at the application layer where data is more exposed than when it is at rest. In countless studies and surveys, industry analysts and CIOs have pointed to the complexity of protecting data at the application layer, in part due to application programmers inconsistently applying data protection policies. However, EncryptRIGHT guarantees that data protection policies are always applied consistently, and embedded role-based access controls ensure that data is unsecured in the correct format, by specific users requesting to unsecure data – all in real-time. Data is always protected, at rest, in use and in motion, from external and internal exposure – both accidental and intentional. This helps users comply with a variety of data protection and privacy mandates, from industry standards such as PCI-DSS to regional regulations like GDPR.

As the digital transformation continues and commerce becomes more distributed, collaborative, and cloud-deployed, companies face unique challenges in data protection. Data has never been more plentiful or more valuable, nor has the need to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access ever been more ubiquitous, regardless of industry or geography. Securing sensitive data has also never been more complex, but Prime Factors continues to deliver general data protection software solutions that help to simplify protecting sensitive information where it is most at risk.