OREANDA-NEWS. November 19, 2012. Guardtime, a company doing its development work in Estonia, at the end of last week announced a partnership with China Telecom, establishing the third largest mobile telecommunication provider in the People's Republic of China as a keyless signature service provider via its Tianyi 3G platform.

Guardtime provides keyless signature technology for validating the integrity and authenticity of digital data.

Guardtime CEO Mike Gault said in the press release that China was a key market for Guardtime. "Together with our existing partners, companies such as Voxeo Labs, Message Bus and Joyent, we hope to transform society to one where electronic data is more reliable than physical and where all data, whether generated by voice, email or machine, comes with irrefutable proof of integrity and authenticity. Establishing China Telecom as a partner is a major step forward for our vision," he said.

Tianyi 3G platform Executive Zhe Mong Li described Guardtime's keyless signature technology as completely unique and having the potential to revolutionize communications by providing an independent audit trail for all voice and electronic messaging on Chinese networks, removing any doubt about message integrity and authenticity.

At the end of October Guardtime received the Shanglin prize in China, which is awarded to promising businesses and new technologies. The Shanglin prize comes together with a five-year tax exemption in China and prize money of a quarter of a million dollars.

China Telecom is the largest fixed-line service worldwide and third largest mobile telecommunications provider in China. It has 153 million mobile service users of whom almost 60 million are users of 3G.

In Estonia Guardtime's service is used by SEB Pank, for instance. Last year the Estonian Ministry of Economy and Communications signed a memorandum with Guardtime under which possibilities will be looked for to use time stamps in the information systems of e-government.

In 2006, a team of Estonian cryptographers, network architects, software developers and security specialists got together to design and build a solution from first principles, naming their invention Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI). As a company, Guardtime now has global reach, but the original research and development team is still located in Tallinn.