News and Events > University of Colorado Licenses Patent-Pending Network Security Technology to Secure 64 Software Corporation

University of Colorado Licenses Patent-Pending Network Security Technology to Secure 64 Software Corporation

February 10, 2005

Boulder, CO - The University of Colorado has licensed network security technology to Secure64,, a software company based in Englewood, Colorado that will use the technology to fortify its secure 64-bit software applications against the disastrous effects of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The technology is a patent-pending algorithm that intelligently responds to abnormal network activity such as DDoS attacks. It was developed in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder by Dr. James Garnett and Dr. Elizabeth Bradley.

DDoS attacks are an increasing threat to the commercial viability of the Internet. For example, the MyDoom virus attack of January, 2004 crippled the website operations of SCO Linux, Inc., and forced Microsoft to take emergency action to forestall the effects. The total cost from this single event is estimated to exceed $250 million (CNN online, January 30, 2004), and similar attacks are now occurring on a daily basis.

The technology was developed as part of Dr. James Garnett's PhD thesis. The method is very different from all current approaches to DDoS protection because it responds to the effects instead of the causes, such as a flood of incoming requests. Because of this, the technology can detect and automatically block an attack even if it does not look like a traditional attack.

Secure64 is a 64-bit software development company establishing a new market standard for the security and performance of network communications. It is the first software company to take full advantage of the Itanium® chip's 64-bit microprocessor architecture to address many of the structural and design limitations of current general-purpose operating systems and hardware technologies. Secure64 allows customers to dramatically increase the performance of network processing, solve the security problems associated with delivering mission-critical content on the network, and move greater amounts of application processing from centralized data centers to network servers - all without disrupting existing network infrastructures.

While completing his thesis work at CU, Dr. Garnett worked with Secure64 developers to implement the algorithm for the Secure64 applications. The CU technology will be available in the first commercial release of the Secure64 product, scheduled for some time this year. Commercial licenses to the CU technology are also available for other software platforms.