Voltage Security today announced products based on the Identity Based Encryption project at Stanford that I blogged below. Old Friend Scott Loftesness is an advisor to the company.

The most intriguing thing about the announcement is the potential to bootstrap secure messaging without the creation of a public key instructure of wide scope. The remarks of Bruce Schneier in the NYT story aside, most Internet users do not find it easy to look up an individual's public key. Voltage has the potential to overcome the downside of network effects that has afflicted PKI, by letting privacy emerge based on pair-wise communication, which is often self-authenticating since the writers known each other and their context of conversation.

Hopefully the company will heed Don Park's sage advice:

Think of cryptography and security as the engine and chasis of the car you are selling.  While they are both important, rest of the car is what sells the car because people can't buy what they can't see.  Don't make the same mistakes most security companies make by hiring mostly crypto and security experts.

I couldn't have said it better. Security is a paradoxic domain where the products are created by professional paranoids, but have to be used by real people. Absolutist views on security are often at tension with useability. If Voltage can navigate those waters, they have a decent chance.
11:07:21 AM    

Uh-oh, fellow Californians, I'm afraid that Sparkey over at Stryker's hangout has discovered one of our biochemical weapons sites baby milk factories. Now that we're outed, it's time to go overt: The world's fifth largest economy needs a military force to match its foreign policy. As for our enemies, we will roast their stomachs in hell.
10:40:46 AM