UNCG and Live Cargo Inc., a Greensboro-based technology company, have signed an exclusive license and technical assistance agreement to develop and market a patent-pending security encryption technology developed by a UNCG professor.

Through the agreement, Live Cargo now has worldwide rights to a unique and proprietary key generation algorithm developed by Dr. Shan Suthaharan, who is director of computer science in the UNCG Department of Mathematical Sciences.

The algorithm will be used for security encryption in data transmission and other applications of information transfer requiring reliable encryption that is both fast and portable. UNCG filed a patent application in 2004 covering the algorithm.

The project was developed through UNCG’s Office of Technology Transfer, which was founded in 2002 and is headed by Jerry McGuire. The university will receive royalties from Live Cargo sales of its products that utilize the UNCG algorithm and will take a small equity position in Live Cargo.

Doug Young, co-founder and chairman of Live Cargo and a UNCG alumnus, called the signing “one of those win-win-win scenarios” where the university, the business and the inventor benefit.

“It’s great to see the benefits associated with being involved with UNCG’s science advisory board and the technology transfer office. Through collaboration, we are leveraging the intellectual capital at UNCG with the business prowess of a local company to create a significant business opportunity,” Young said. “This is a great partnership and I am honored to be part of it. This should serve as a great business model and an example for other companies to be involved with UNCG.”

UNCG Provost Ed Uprichard, who signed the agreement with Young, called the agreement “a great example of how we can take faculty members’ intellectual property and translate it into an application for the business world. What makes this so sweet is that we can work with a local company where executives have been such good friends to the university.”

Suthaharan’s revolutionary algorithm provides security to Internet applications and data transmission. It is a simple, flexible and computationally inexpensive algorithm that provides high security and scalability over a large number of Internet users. It can accept fingerprints and/or photographs, even digital video frames, to generate unique cryptographic keys for a secure access control to a system or an application over the Internet.

Fingerprints and photographs, as well as video frames, can also be used with this algorithm to encrypt data in order to provide security with authentication during transmission over the Internet. The uniqueness of this algorithm is that it can be used as an encryption algorithm and a secure hash function for authentication and digital signatures. It can also be used in smartcard technology that requires storage of unique encrypted keys in smartcards and to be used in various cryptographic applications.

A UNCG faculty member since 2001, Suthaharan earned his Ph.D. in computer science at Monash University in Australia. His main research interests are in the areas of multimedia data and network security, congestion control for TCP/IP networks, grid computing, compression and communications, and digital signal processing. He serves on a UNC system team, which has received a $650,000 multi-campus award from the UNC Office of the President, to promote high performance computing and computational sciences in North Carolina. Before coming to UNCG, he was chairman of the Computer Science Department at Tennessee State University.

Since its formation in 2002, the Office of Technology Transfer has been supporting UNCG's effort to encourage innovation and disseminate knowledge. OTT serves the university and the public by commercializing discoveries developed by faculty, students and staff. It also assists faculty in obtaining research support from corporate sponsors.

OTT’s functions include: consulting on intellectual property and technology transfer, determining patentability and assessing commercial potential of the disclosed inventions, administrating the patent process, negotiating licensing agreements, and supporting UNCG inventors in establishing start-up companies to commercialize their inventions.

Live Cargo is a premier developer of proprietary software technology used for secure file transfer and storage that improves and optimizes processes associated with transferring documents and digital media over the Internet. The company has developed a patent-pending product architecture and methodology to deliver scalable applications that not only provide measurable results, but also require very little effort to maintain.

Live Cargo is focusing on five primary markets that have the largest need for secure file transfer technology: government and education, financial, medical, professional services, and creative services.