The Will to Take a Different Approach to Cyber Security
The reported US Treasury Department and US Commerce Department hacks should come as no surprise. Defending the perimeter does not work and will never work because there is too much attack surface to defend. The U.S. government cyber security spending was estimated at approximately $19 billion for 2020. Total cybersecurity spending was estimated at $134 billion for 2020. Yet, one product was reportedly compromised through a single supply chain hack and now numerous agencies and corporations are scrambling to identify and mitigate the damage. $134 billion in annual spending that never had any chance of keeping us safe. It is the equivalent of a speed bump.
There are 4 technology advancements that exist TODAY that eliminate MOST of the cyber threat while spending LESS on cybersecurity. However, today's core IT products can't support them without being rearchitected, and frankly, they generate so much revenue that the companies that sell them are unlikely to ever do so. If they won't change, they can simply be replaced. The technology advancements are:
- High Performance Searchable Encryption
- Cryptographic Chain of Custody
- Massively Parallel Consensus
- Efficient replication and synchronization after network outages
Craxel has been granted multiple patents for high performance searchable encryption and this technology has been proven in customer trials to be approximately 1 million times faster than fully homomorphic encryption for data sets of 1 billion records. Query times measured in milliseconds to seconds for more complex aggregate queries. Simply put, every database in the world can be replaced with an encrypted database where the servers only hold strongly encrypted records and the encryption keys are never present on those servers. If a hacker breaches those servers, they only see strongly encrypted data. Access to each individual record controlled using cryptography. Gartner pegged the 2018 database market at $46 billion. $46 billion a year for products that can't keep your data safe. They should change or be replaced.
Cryptographic chain of custody provides the ability to trust the provenance of information, an identity, access grant, or software code. The key to an effective zero trust access control system to protect every part of IT is scalable, fast cryptographic chain of custody. For this to be useful at scale requires solutions to a myriad of problems Blockchain or Distributed Ledger approaches haven't been able to solve. We identified and implemented the missing technology (massively parallel consensus) that solves these problems. So now, you can use fast, scalable, cryptographic chain of custody to implement zero-trust. A brick wall based on math protecting every individual piece of information.
Ransomware and destructive attacks are wreaking havoc. The simple answer to ransomware is massively parallel consensus so that information can be actively replicated to multiple servers while supporting the scale required. Our files and our database records should be encrypted and ACTIVELY replicated to many servers, so if one server is compromised, our data is safe and still highly available. Sometimes networks go down, so technology to efficiently synchronize when they come back up is extremely important for highly available systems. Active replication is a common sense solution to ransomware. Why isn't everyone storing their files in automatically replicated cloud storage? Maybe they worry about storing their sensitive files there. We can solve that using high performance searchable encryption. Encrypt all your files and put them in nice, safe, replicated cloud storage and we'll help you efficiently organize those encrypted files using searchable encryption.
We identified that these four key technology solutions would transform IT from a cost, performance, and security perspective. Then we implemented them in our Black Forest Digital Trust Platform. Your enterprise can be very secure and highly performant at scale. It just takes the will to move on from today's failed approaches.