Friday, March 27, 2009

UTD School of Management student team wins tech competition

By Pegasus News wire

A duo of MBA students at the University of Texas at Dallas have come out on top of a competition to come up with a simple, secure way to authenticate users on multiple networks.

not provided by UTD

This might have been one of the losing entries in the contest, had it indeed been submitted.

The competition was held March 24 - 25 at the World's Best Technologies Showcase in Arlington, and was sponsored jointly by the IC² Institute at the University of Texas at Austin and the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance.

Stephen Dunlap and William “Ben” Morrow's highly-secure (yet user-transparent) solution is called PassPro-tech, and utilizes both hardware and software components to provide secure Internet authentication while providing a robust level of protection from attacks by hackers.

It also slices, dices and juliennes, but that's another (and completely made-up) story.

The underlying technology was invented by Dr. Jim Pritchard, a Richardson-based dentist and inventor. It has been under development since 2000 and several patents have been issued, with more pending.

Says Dr. Joseph Picken, executive director of the Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at UT Dallas: “We’re pleased for and proud of Stephen and Ben and their performance in what was a challenging competition. Over the next several weeks, they’ll be representing UT Dallas in similar competitions at the University of Nebraska, the University of Manitoba, Rice University and UT Austin. They’ve accomplished a great deal so far, and we look forward to their success in future competitions.”

Stephen and Ben: SAAA-lute!

posted by JM

See more stories in:

• Colleges & Universities > University of Texas at Dallas