Data integrity vendor Guardtime hopes its newly announced protocol will replace RSA for the purposes of authentication and digital signatures, touting it as easier to manage and less vulnerable to hacking.

Called BLT, the protocol name comes from the last initials of its inventors, Ahto Buldas, Risto Laanoja and Ahto Truu, just as RSA comes from the last initials of its inventors, Ron Rivest,  Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman.

Rather than relying on public and private keys (PKI) as RSA does, BLT is based on hash-function cryptography, which requires no keys and so requires no issuing, updating or revoking of keys. As a result, it can scale to cover exabytes (10¹⁸ bytes) with little overhead, says the company’s CEO Mike Gault. And there are no cryptographic secrets to be compromised.

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