Moviestorm, produced by Cambridge startup Short Fuze, is the GarageBand of the animation world - an innovative Java-based animation tool allowing quick and intuitive creation of 3D movies using ready-made character puppets, props and scenery. Its success revolves around a strong user community who produce and license puppets and other content in addition to Short Fuze’s in-house creations. We worked with Short Fuze in early 2007 to find a solution that allows users to create and publish content packs, while preventing unpaid access to content.

Initially we were asked to analyse some commercial DRM options, in the hope of determining conclusively whether or not they met Moviestorm’s specific needs. However, they proved more focused on software than content management, so we then worked with Short Fuze to refine their requirements and discuss a custom solution. Ultimately we produced a Java-based certificate architecture designed to combine stronger security than Java’s own architecture currently provides with maximum ease of use; we also provided Short Fuze with an interactive training seminar to assist them with integrating our software into Moviestorm, and full after-sales support.

Read more about the process and the end result in the full article in our Case Studies section.

We recently completed a project for a client which saw us create a certificate-based authorisation system in Java.

We didn’t want to invent any new cryptography, but it turned out that Java does not currently provide mechanisms of a strength we considered sufficient for general purpose use.

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We were recently tasked with recommending some security mechanisms for a client. In particular, we had to recommend algorithms and key sizes for a process which requires both digital signatures and encryption.

Figuring out the time which will be required to crack a key is something of a future-prediction game, but we can have a good stab at it.

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