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Toronto-based PRATA Technologies Inc. is one of 12 Canadian companies elected to receive funding from a pool of $1.9 million aimed at helping small companies bring their intelligent systems products to market faster in spite of uncertain economic times.

The funding is being provided jointly by Ottawa-based Precarn - which is providing $668,000 through its Industrial Technology Gap program, an initiative aimed at supporting small or start-up businesses with an infusion of up to $60,000 per company - and other project partners.

PRATA Technologies Inc., a University of Toronto spin-off company, will use the funds to develop a faster computer security technology. The company has developed a computer authentication algorithm expected to eliminate the speed bottleneck in current cryptography implementations. While today's computer networks operate at speeds in the Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) realm or higher, common authentication (or hash) algorithms - used to ensure the data integrity of information as it travels from point A to point B - are limited to speeds of 600 Megabits-per-second (Mbps).

The hardware implementation of PRATA's Erindale bitstream algorithm, which is based on completely new design principles, has been shown to reach speeds as high as two Gbps in a lab setting and is considered a breakthrough in the world of cryptography. Other high-speed algorithms are based on design principles no longer considered secure by those in the industry.

PRATA Technologies was selected from 56 small companies that submitted proposals.