Encrypted cloud to be the next Hungarian world-success

Tresorit, slowly approaching world-fame with ten-thousands of clients and a super-safe sharing software, can devastate the world-market, reports szeretlekmagyaroszag.hu.

Many say that the success of Tresorit resembles that of Prezi or Ustream.

The Hungarian company has an increasing client-base in Europe and in the North-American region, and they are already working on their new product, which would make their encryption technology available to further corporations.

Encrypted Dropbox

Tresorit is a service for sharing and storing files available for both companies and individual users. Today’s cloud services, like Dropbox, give storage space, where you, or even large companies, like MOL or McDonald’s, can store data. An average person may think that it is not so important to keep their data safe from professional hackers (or, at least, would not pay ten-thousands every month to achive such a safety), but it is the experience of Tresorit that, as soon as concrete questions are asked (would you like your private photos to be out on the internet?), the opinion of people suddenly change. Furthermore, it is important for companies to keep certain sensitive data safe for sure.

Dropbox, for example, is not like that. Tresorit found this market gap in the last few years, so they already have more than ten-thousand company and a hundred-thousand individual users today. Tresorit’s structure is based on end-to-end encryption, which means that even they cannot see the files of the users. These files get encrypted on the device of the user, therefore the system is so safe that they actually reward any hackers, who successfully break into the system, with USD 50,000.

From the university to the secret service

The story of Tresorit started at Budapest University of Technology and Economics, in the research centre of the Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security, where two of the founders, István Lám and Szilveszter Szebeni, worked together. They started developing the encryption system, that gives the basis of Tresorit and the “shareable encryption”, during their BSc, which is already under patent today.

They wanted to share their university notes safely, but they did not trust the popular cloud systems, like Dropbox.

This is where the idea came from, to create their own solution, which is much safer than the well-known services, but still has the comforts offered by the cloud. During the research they found out how the cloud-based data storage can be safe through the use of an end-to-end encryption system. Completed with the third founder, György Szilágyi, who is responsible for product development, they decided that this level of novelty is worth to put on the market. They kept the good relationship with the university; the majority of their programmers studied or are still studying there, the average age at the company is 27.

The company brought up a brilliant idea in 2013. They wanted to prove that their system is unbreakable, so they offered USD 50,000 to the one who can reach a file that is stored in Tresorit.

The speciality of the competition was that the hackers and the experts of system-security were provided with the same administrator-rights that the Supreme System Administrators of Tresorit use.

In more than a year nobody could break the encryption and read the files – although there were attempts by acknowledged institutions, like MIT or Stanford. György  Szilágyi was proud to tell:

“We showed that not only hackers with evil intent, or system-security, but even we are unable to reach the files stored in the system. We cannot read them, so, even if we wanted to forward it to the national security in a readable format, we are not able to do so. The essence of Tresorit is, that only the user has the key to access the classified files. Only they can read them and, of course, people they share it with.”