ARX (Algorithmic Research Ltd.) is a

digital security Computer security (also cybersecurity, digital security, or information technology (IT) security) is a subdiscipline within the field of information security. It consists of the protection of computer software, systems and networks from thre ...

company headquartered in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

, CA, with offices in the UK, the Netherlands, Australia and Israel. It is the creator of ARX CoSign, a digital signature technology, along with related digital signature security technology products. ARX was acquired by DocuSign in May 2015. The acquisition builds on a three-year business partnership between DocuSign and ARX, bringing together ARX's CoSign digital signature technology with DocuSign's Digital Transaction Management (DTM) platform and broadens The DocuSign Global Trust Network. The ARX digital signature products are based on

public key infrastructure A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a set of roles, policies, hardware, software and procedures needed to create, manage, distribute, use, store and revoke digital certificates and manage public-key encryption. The purpose of a PKI is to fac ...

(PKI) technology, with the digital signatures resulting from a

cryptographic Cryptography, or cryptology (from "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or '' -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More gen ...

operation that creates a "fingerprint" unique to both the signer and the content, so that they cannot be copied, forged or tampered with. This process provides proof of signer identity, data integrity and the non-repudiation of signed documents, all of which can be verified without the need for proprietary verification software. The CoSign solution of the company integrates into a large range of document management and workflow automation systems and is intended to streamline workflow processes requiring signatures. ARX partners with document management and workflow solution providers including

SharePoint SharePoint is a collection of enterprise content management and knowledge management tools developed by Microsoft. Launched in 2001, it was initially bundled with Windows Server as Windows SharePoint Server, then renamed to Microsoft Office ...

OpenText OpenText Corporation (styled as opentext) is a global software company that develops and sells information management software. OpenText, headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, is Canada's fourth-largest software company as of 2022, and r ...

Oracle An oracle is a person or thing considered to provide insight, wise counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. If done through occultic means, it is a form of divination. Descript ...

, Alfresco, Nintex and K2. Industries of focus include life science (particularly research and clinical trials), engineering, legal and federal/local governments. ARX clients are based in North America, Africa, Europe and Asia-Pacific. In Italy, CoSign is used by the Ministry of Defence, RAI, Senate, Court of Accounts, State Police and Bank of Italy. It is also used by the European Court of Human Rights to digitize and streamline their application process. ARX solutions have been validated for security standards such as

NIST The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical s ...

FIPS 140-2 level 3, FIPS 186 and ETSI TS 101 733. In 2013, CoSign was named "the strongest digital signature solution" in the 2013 report. In August 2014, CoSign received

Common Criteria The Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation (referred to as Common Criteria or CC) is an international standard (International Organization for Standardization, ISO/International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC 15408) for co ...

EAL4+ certification, thus becoming the first remote / server-side digital signature solution to be fully compliant with the EU's newly enacted Electronic Identification and Trust Services regulation for Electronic Transactions in the Internal Market (eIDAS). ARX solutions also comply with ESIGN, UETA, FDA 21 CFR Part 11, SOX,

HIPAA The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA or the Kennedy– Kassebaum Act) is a United States Act of Congress enacted by the 104th United States Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on August 21, ...

, and the

USDA The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is an United States federal executive departments, executive department of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that aims to meet the needs of commerc ...

, among many other signature-related country- and industry-specific laws and regulations.

History

ARX was founded in 1987 by Prof. Amos Fiat and Yossi Tulpan and focused on developing encryption-based products, which included an RSA-smartcard developed for Canal+ in 1989, a secure-PIN entry keyboard connected smartcard reader, cryptographic toolkits, a network-attached cryptographic server (HSM), and a

VPN Virtual private network (VPN) is a network architecture for virtually extending a private network (i.e. any computer network which is not the public Internet) across one or multiple other networks which are either untrusted (as they are not c ...

. In September 1997 ARX was acquired by Cylink Corp (NASDAQ:CYLK) from Sunnyvale, California. In 2001 the company went through a

management buyout A management buyout (MBO) is a form of acquisition in which a company's existing managers acquire a large part, or all, of the company, whether from a parent company or individual. Management- and/or leveraged buyouts became noted phenomena of 19 ...

(MBO) initiated by Dr. Gadi Aharoni. Dr. Aharoni the former President and CEO of ARX for 14 years, and under his leadership the company gradually switched to focus on its newly developed CoSign Digital-Signature solution. In May 2015, ARX was acquired by its U.S. competitor DocuSign.

References

External links

What is the eIDAS Regulation
{{Authority control Companies based in San Francisco Computer security companies