Blog · 13 September 2022

Fraunhofer Society’s research played a part in Bitwards’ development

The third part of the company history: what the German research organisation Fraunhofer Society contributed to the technology behind the platform.

In 2014 TEKES, today’s Business Finland, contacted Eljas Saastamoinen, co-founder of Bitwards, while he was still working at Flexim Security, because a US-based company was looking for clients in the Finnish market. The company had been working on MP3 technology with the Fraunhofer Society, a German research organisation focusing on different fields of applied science.

The Fraunhofer Society had been broadly researching mobile access security and was trying to patent a model. Eljas visited the headquarters in Germany many times, and Flexim Security and the German institute started a collaboration.

Eventually the Fraunhofer Society published the results of their research. Still, there was no proof of concept, and while the cooperation lasted for some time, it didn’t bring the wanted results. However, this Fraunhofer collaboration was a small but important step in the development of Bitwards.

Assa Abloy acquired Flexim Security in 2015. At the same time, Eljas had come across the research by Jan-Erik Ekberg, who had published a scientific article, “The Untapped Potential of Trusted Execution Environments on Mobile Devices”. At that point, Eljas and Niklas Kaustinen decided to start up their own business, and 2016 saw the creation of Bitwards.

Originally published on bitwards.fi, 13 September 2022.