RESEARCH and DEVELOPMENT

Unlike many consulting organizations, we're deeply commited to research, the hard (and expensive!) labor of love needed to develop technology before it can become a viable business tool.

Our research is largely focused on issues that are now beginning to be faced and problems that we'll be facing soon. Simply stated, we keep it practical. As these problems become better understood, we release and contribute to tools that help people to manage the issues.

Some highlights of the work our folks have been involved with include:

OpenNMS

The world's first enterprise-grade network management platform developed under the open-source model benefits from the expertise of key Interhackers. More information on the project can be found on the project's page at SourceForge.

Internet Privacy Project

An ongoing research project to understand not only how privacy works in theory, but how real systems that are being developed are affecting privacy in practice. This project has documented failures of policy and technology of organizations like TRUSTe, Toys R Us, DoubleClick, and Netscape -- not to say "look, these guys are bad", for imperfection is part of being human, but to say "look, here's a system that had unintended consequences, let's learn its lesson".

Shibboleth -- a privacy-aware mailing list manager

A consequence of connecting everyone together through the Internet is the inability for people to work conveniently together in closed groups, without fear of outsiders or ex-insiders interfering. Shibboleth is a project that made this kind of email-based collaboration possible. A formal paper about the system was presented at the 9th USENIX Security Symposium and the system is now available free of charge from SourceForge.

DESCHALL -- The first successful brute-force attack against DES

DESCHALL was a project started by Rocke Verser to answer a challenge posed by RSA Data Security, Inc., in January of 1997. Break a sample message encrypted with DES, the US Government standard for data encryption for 20 years, and win a prize. Interhack founder Matt Curtin joined the project early and helped lead the group to success in June 1997.

You'll find the results of our work published in various journals, cited in the press, and always available for public review and comment free of charge. Our research site's publications index is the best place to look for our public documents.