Microsoft Research in India plans to double their current employee core to 100 in the next 18 months. The growth in workers will gradually shift their focus to researching more on cryptography and security related issues. Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research added that cryptography is one of the main areas of research for the software giant. It's grown in popularity because of its impact in basic computer security, media rights, and management, he added.

Padmanabhan Anandan, managing director of Microsoft Research in India said that Microsoft decided to concentrate on cryptography in India in part due to the high level of complex mathematical skills available in the country that are critical for research in cryptography.

Although cryptography is a generally broad field, they will concentrate on what the future market will probably dictate. Ramarathnam Venkatesan, senior researcher in cryptography at Microsoft Research in Redmond said that the India facility will work on building new cryptographic primitive operations, such as encryption, decryption, and authentication algorithms, and will also analyze and try to break existing algorithms. He added that the same group will also focus on cryptography for smaller devices, such as mobile phones and RFID (radio frequency identification) devices which do not have the same computational resources as, say, a PC.

When Venkatesan said that "because some institutions are already doing work in the area of cryptography� the case of joint research that Microsoft may patent, the company will enter into appropriate arrangements with the academic institutions."

One has to wonder how closely tied is this to their latest FAT file patent decision.