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The article presents information on several companies offering computer security products. Akamai Technologies Inc., which operates a private data network, has security services that are built on top of the software and hardware it uses for its own network. Amazon.Com Inc., which sells cloud-based storage and processing equipment, protects customers' data by maintaining backups and physically preventing unauthorized access to data centers. EMC Corp. owns critical encryption technology RSA algorithm, which is used worldwide to encrypt sensitive information sent over the Internet.

This article explores the process of making safe data transmission faster. Many software companies use encryption to protect their programs from tampering or copying, but even those protections can be circumvented by a hacker who is skilled and motivated enough. In a conventional computer, protected software is decoded and stored in memory until the processor calls for it; hackers can tap into decoded instructions as they move from memory to the processor by listening to the channel between the two. Safeguards exist--namely, the XOM (execution-only memory) processor, which keeps information encrypted until it gets the processor--but systems that use them are slow. The bottleneck in most XOM systems is the decryption procedure: encrypted instructions are first fetched from the memory, then decoded, then executed. Jun Yang, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of California, Riverside, and colleagues and the University of Texas at Dallas use a security scheme called a one-time pad that can start decryption without the data. The procedure fetches data and start the decryption in parallel, so that the processor can act on instructions almost as they arrive. In a simulation, the extra time needed for decryption dropped from 20.8 percent of the computation time in XOM processors to a mere 1.3 percent.