Praxis develops vault access system

As the result of work developing secure software for Mondex, now part of Mastercard, the engineering team at Praxis, in Bath, UK, was approached by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to develop software for an unclassified research demonstration programme.
The challenge the NSA set the engineers was to rebuild software for the Tokeneer, a system that controls access to a vault through the use of a smart-card reader/writer and a fingerprint reader. However, this was no ordinary software development task – the software itself had to be robust, reliable and error free.

Most of the engineering on the project was conducted by a team of three specialists over a nine-month period; once completed, it was delivered to the NSA.

According to Dr Rod Chapman, a principal engineer at Altran Praxis, the software development process involved a great deal of work precisely defining the environment in which the system was to function.