Category: New Tech

APIs have come to embody the yin and yang of our digital lives.

Related: Biden moves to protect water facilities

Without application programming interface, all the cool digital services we take for granted would not be possible.

But it’s also true that the way software developers and companies have deployed APIs has contributed greatly to the exponential expansion of the cyber-attack surface. APIs have emerged as a go-to tool used by threat actors in all phases of sophisticated, multi-stage network attacks.

Upon gaining a toehold on a targeted device or server, attackers now quickly turn their attention to locating and manipulating available APIs to hook deeply into company systems. APIs provide paths to move laterally, to implant malware and to steal data.

Guest expert: Sudeep Padiyar, founding member, Traceable.ai

The encouraging news is that API security technology has advanced quite a bit over the past five years or so.

I had the chance at Black Hat 2022 to visit with Sudeep Padiyar, founding member and director of product management, at Traceable, a San Francisco-based supplier of advanced API security systems. Traceable launched in 2018, the brainchild of tech entrepreneurs Jyoti Bansal and Sanjay Nagaraj; it provides deep-dive API management capabilities — as software is being developed and while it is being used in the field.

We discussed the Gordian-knot challenge security teams face getting a grip on the avalanche of APIs hooking into their organizations. For a full drill down, please give the accompanying podcast a listen.

The security-proofing of APIs is gaining traction, and that’s a very good thing. I’ll keep watch and keep reporting.

Acohido

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.

(LW provides consulting services to the vendors we cover.)

Short-handed cybersecurity teams face a daunting challenge.

Related: ‘ASM’ is cybersecurity’s new centerpiece

In an intensely complex, highly dynamic operating environment, they must proactively mitigate myriad vulnerabilities and at the same time curtail the harm wrought by a relentless adversary: criminal hacking collectives.

In short, attack surface management has become the main tent pole of cybersecurity. A rock-solid, comprehensive battle plan has been painstakingly laid out, in the form of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. And now advanced weaponry is arriving that leverages data analytics to tighten up systems and smother attacks.

Guest expert: Justin Fier, VP Tactical Risk and Response, Darktrace

One supplier in the thick of this development is Cambridge, UK-based Darktrace, a supplier of security systems designed to help companies“think like an attacker,’ says Justin Fier, Darktrace vice-president of tactical risk and response, whom I had the chance to visit with at Black Hat 2022.

We discussed how legacy, on-premises cybersecurity systems generate massive amounts of telemetry – data which is perfectly suited for high-scale, automated data analytics. This is why it makes so much sense for artificial intelligence, generally, to be brought to bear in attack surface management.

Darktrace’s AI solutions, for instance, can help companies rein in API exposures,  defuse shadow IT,  protect their supply chain and even boost DevSecOps, Fier told me. For a full drill down on our conversation, please give the accompanying podcast a listen.

What’s going to happen as more of these advanced, AI-infused cybersecurity weapons get into the mix on the side of the good guys? I’ll keep watch and keep reporting.

Acohido

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.

(LW provides consulting services to the vendors w

The sunsetting of Virtual Private Networks is underway.

Related: VPNs as a DIY tool for consumers, small businesses

VPNs are on a fast track to becoming obsolete, at least when it comes to defending enterprise networks. VPNs are being replaced by zero trust network access, or ZTNA.

VPNs encrypt data streams and protect endpoints from unauthorized access, essentially by requiring all network communications to flow over a secured pipe. VPNs verify once and that’s it. This was an effective approach when on-premises data centers predominated.

By contrast, ZTNA never trusts and always verifies. A user gets continually vetted, per device and per software application — and behaviors get continually analyzed to sniff out suspicious patterns.

Guest expert: Rajiv Pimplaskar, CEO, Dispersive

This new approach is required — now that software-defined resources scattered across hybrid and public clouds have come to rule the day.

I had the chance at Black Hat 2022 to visit with Rajiv Pimplaskar, CEO at Dispersive,  an Alpharetta, GA-based supplier of advanced cloud obfuscation technology. We discussed how ZTNA has emerged as a key component of new network security frameworks, such as secure access service edge (SASE) and security service edge (SSE)

We also spoke about how Dispersive is leveraging spread spectrum technology, which has its roots in World War II submarine warfare, to more effectively secure modern business networks. For a full drill down on our forward-looking discussion, please give the accompanying podcast a listen.

Can the deployment of WWII battlefield technology turn the tide against hordes of threat actors? I’ll keep watch and keep reporting.

Acohido

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.

(LW provides consulting services to the vendors we cover.)

It’s not difficult to visualize how companies interconnecting to cloud resources at a breakneck pace contribute to the outward expansion of their networks’ attack surface.

Related: Why ‘SBOM’ is gaining traction

If that wasn’t bad enough, the attack surface companies must defend is expanding inwardly, as well – as software tampering at a deep level escalates.

The Solar Winds breach and the disclosure of the massive Log4J vulnerability have put company decision makers on high alert with respect to this freshly-minted exposure. Findings released this week by ReversingLabs show 87 percent of security and technology professionals view software tampering as a new breach vector of concern, yet only 37 percent say they have a way to detect it across their software supply chain.

I had a chance to discuss software tampering with Tomislav Pericin, co-founder and chief software architect of ReversingLabs, a Cambridge, MA-based vendor that helps companies granularly analyze their software code. For a full drill down on our discussion please give the accompanying podcast a listen. Here are the big takeaways:

‘Dependency confusion’

Much of the discussion at RSA Conference 2022, which convenes next week in San Francisco, will boil down to slowing attack surface expansion. This now includes paying much closer attention to the elite threat actors who are moving inwardly to carve out fresh vectors taking them deep inside software coding.

The perpetrators of the Solar Winds breach, for instance, tampered with a build system of the widely-used Orion network management tool. They then were able to trick some 18,000 companies into deploying an authentically-signed Orion update carrying a heavily-obfuscated backdoor.

Log4J, aka Log4Shell, refers to a gaping vulnerability that exists in an open-source logging library that’s deeply embedded within servers and applications all across the public Internet. Its function is to record events in a log for a system administrator to review and act upon. Left unpatched, Log4Shell, presents a ripe opportunity for a bad actor to carry out remote code execution attacks, Pericin told me.

This type of attack takes advantage of the highly dynamic, ephemeral way software interconnects to make modern digital services possible.

Pericin

“As we go about defining layers on top of layers of application code, understanding all the interdependencies becomes very complex,” Pericin told me. “You really need to go deep into all of these layers to be able to understand if there’s any hidden behaviors or unaccounted for code that introduce risk in any of the layers.”

Obfuscated tampering

Dependency confusion can arise anytime a developer reaches out to a package repository. Modern software is built on pillars of open-source components, and package repositories offer an easy access to the wealth of pre-built code that makes development faster. However, not all of that code is safe to use. Capitalizing on dependency confusion, threat actors seek ways to insert malicious elements; and they take intricate steps to obfuscate their code tampering. Most often their objective is to install a back door through which they can come and go – and take full control of the underlying system anytime they please, Pericin says.

Last year, white hat researcher Alex Birsan shed a bright light on just how big an opportunity this presents to malicious hackers. Birsan demonstrated how dependency confusion attacks could be leveraged to tamper with coding deep inside of system software at Apple, PayPal, Tesla, Netflix, Uber, Shopify and Yelp!.

Then in late April, ReversingLabs and other vendors shared stunning evidence of such attacks moving beyond the theoretical and into live service. A red team of security researchers dissected a dependency confusion campaign aimed at taking control of the networks of leading media, logistics and industrial firms in Germany.

The basic definition of software tampering, Pericin notes, is to insert unverified code into the authorized code base. In the current, operating environment, there’s limitless opportunity to tamper with code. This is because such a high premium is put on agility.

“There are many places in the software supply chain where you can add unverified code, and the attackers are actually doing that,” Pericin says. “And that’s also why it can be so hard to detect.”

Implementing SBOM

Even as their organizations push more operations out to the Internet edge, senior executives are starting to realize that their internal attack surface is riddled with security holes, as well. Some 98 percent of the respondents to the ReversingLabs poll acknowledged that software supply chain risks are rising – due to their intensive use of built-on third party code and open source code. However, only 51 percent believed they could prevent their software from being tampered with.

For its part, ReversingLabs supplies an advanced code scanning and analysis service, called Software Assurance, that can help companies verify that its applications haven’t been tampered with. Software developers at large shops are getting into the habit of using this tool to deeply scan software packages as a final quality check, just before deployment, Pericin told me.

Some companies are going so far as using this tool to selectively scan mission-critical software arriving from smaller houses and independent developers for behavioral oddities, as well, he says.

Having the ability to granularly scan code also plays well with the drive to mainstream SBOM, which stands for Software Bill of Materials.

SBOM is an industry effort to standardize the documentation of a complete list of authorized components in a software application.

President Biden’s cybersecurity executive order, issued in May, includes a detailed SBOM requirement for all software delivered to the federal government.

And now advanced scanning tools, like those supplied by ReversingLabs, are ready for prime time – to help companies detect and deter software tampering, as well as implement SBOM as a standard practice.

“One of the outcomes of doing this analysis is you gain the ability to correctly identify what’s present in the software package, which is the software bill of materials,” Pericin observes.

In today’s environment, organizations need to figure out how to secure their external edge, that’s for certain. But it’s equally important to account for their internal edge, to stop software tampering in its tracks. It’s encouraging that the technology to do that is available. I’ll keep watch and keep reporting.

Acohido

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.

(LW provides consulting services to the vendors we cover.)

 

 

Companies have come to depend on Software as a Service – SaaS — like never before.

Related: Managed security services catch on

From Office 365 to Zoom to Salesforce.com, cloud-hosted software applications have come to make up the nerve center of daily business activity. Companies now reach for SaaS apps for clerical chores, conferencing, customer relationship management, human resources, salesforce automation, supply chain management, web content creation and much more, even security.

This development has intensified the pressure on companies to fully engage in the “shared responsibility” model of cybersecurity, a topic in that will be in the limelight at RSA Conference 2022 next week in San Francisco.

I visited with Maor Bin, co-founder and CEO of Tel Aviv-based Adaptive Shield, a pioneer in a new security discipline referred to as SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM.) SSPM is part of emerging class of security tools that are being ramped up to help companies dial-in SaaS security settings as they should have started doing long ago.

This fix is just getting under way. For a full drill down, please give the accompanying podcast a listen. Here are the key takeaways:

Shrugging off security

A sharp line got drawn in the sand, some years ago, when Amazon Web Services (AWS) took the lead in championing the shared responsibility security model.

To accelerate cloud migration, AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud guaranteed that the hosted IT infrastructure they sought to rent to enterprises would be security-hardened – at least on their end. For subscribers, the tech giants issued a sprawling set of security settings for their customers’ security teams to monkey with. It was left up to each company to dial-in just the right amount of security-vs-convenience.

SaaS vendors, of course, readily adopted the shared responsibility model pushed out by the IT infrastructure giants. Why wouldn’t they? Thus, the burden was laid squarely on company security teams to harden cloud-connections on their end.

Bin

What happened next was predictable. Caught up in chasing the productivity benefits of cloud computing, many companies looked past  doing any security due diligence, Bin says.

Security teams ultimately were caught flat-footed, he says. Security analysts had gotten accustomed to locking down servers and applications that were on premises and within their arms’ reach. But they couldn’t piece together the puzzle of how to systematically configure myriad overlapping security settings scattered across dozens of SaaS applications.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology recognized this huge security gap for what it was, and issued NIST 800-53 and NIST 800-171 –detailed criteria for securely configuring cloud connections. But many companies simply shrugged off the NIST protocols.

“It turned out to be very hard for security teams to get control of SaaS applications,” Bin observes.  “First of all, there was a lack of any knowledge base inside companies and often times the owner of the given SaaS app wasn’t very cooperative.”

SaaS due diligence

Threat actors, of course, didn’t miss their opportunity. Wave after wave of successful exploits took full advantage of the misconfigurations spinning out of cloud migration. Fraudulent cash transfers, massive ransomware payouts, infrastructure and supply chain disruptions all climbed to new heights. And malicious hackers attained deep, unauthorized access left and right. Every CISO should, by now, cringe at the thought of his or her organization becoming the next Capital One or Solar Winds or Colonial Pipeline.

At RSA Conference 2022, which opens next week in San Francisco, the buzz will be around the good guys finally getting their act together and pushing back. For instance, an entire cottage industry of cybersecurity vendors has ramped up specifically to help companies improve their cloud “security posture management.”

This includes advanced cloud access security broker (CASB) and cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) tools.  SSPM solutions, like Adaptive Shield’s, are among the newest and most innovative tools. Other categories getting showcased at RSAC 2022 include cloud security posture management (CSPM) and application security posture management (ASPM) technologies.

For its part, Adaptive Shield supplies a solution designed to provide full visibility and control of every granular security configuration in some 70 SaaS applications now used widely by enterprises. This can range from dozens to hundreds of security toggles, per application, controlling things like privileged access, multi-factor authentication, phishing protection, digital key management, auditing and much more.

Tools at hand

Security teams now have the means to methodically filter through and make strategic adjustments of each and every SaaS security parameter. Misconfigurations – i.e. settings that don’t meet NIST best practices — can be addressed immediately, or a service ticket can be created and sent on its way.

“I like to call this SaaS security hygiene,” Bin says. “It’s a way to align your users, your devices and your third-party applications with different activities and different privileges. Misconfigurations is huge part of it, but it’s just one of the moving parts of securing your SaaS.”

Doing this level of SaaS security due diligence on a consistent basis is clearly something well worth doing and something that needs to become standard practice. It will steadily improve an organization’s cloud security policies over time; and it should also promote security awareness and reinforce security best practices far beyond the security team, namely to the users of the apps.

Company by company this will slow the expansion of the attack surface, perhaps even start to help shrink the attack surface over time. Things are moving in a good direction. I’ll keep watch and keep reporting.

Acohido

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.

(LW provides consulting services to the vendors we cover.)

The shift to software-defined everything and reliance on IT infrastructure scattered across the Internet has boosted corporate productivity rather spectacularly.

Related: Stopping attack surface expansion

And yet, the modern attack surface continues to expand exponentially, largely unchecked. This dichotomy cannot be tolerated over the long run.

Encouragingly, an emerging class of network visibility technology is gaining notable traction. These specialized tools are expressly designed to help companies get a much better grip on the sprawling array of digital assets they’ve come to depend on. Gartner refers to this nascent technology and emerging discipline as “cyber asset attack surface management,” or CAASM.

I sat down with Erkang Zheng, founder and CEO of JupiterOne, a Morrisville, NC-based CAASM platform provider, to discuss how security got left so far behind in digital transformation – and why getting attack surface management under control is an essential first step to catching up.

For a full drill down, please give the accompanying podcast a listen. Here are my takeaways:

Shoring up fast-and-risky

For most of the past 25 years, company networks were made up of clearly defined internal boundaries encompassed by a hard-and-fast perimeter. And the role of the security team was straightforward: defend the network, protect IT.

But then along came digital transformation. Internal and external network boundaries gave way to agile software development and everything-as-a-hosted-service. Organizations today move as fast as they can, expect to break things and count on iterating improvements on the fly. Fast-and-risky has become the working definition of software innovation.

Rock star developers in cutting-edge organizations are encouraged to make things happen. They live-and-die by the tenants of open-source and DevOps and lean on cloud-native IT infrastructure. Accelerating complexity has been the result.

The problem with following the fast-and-risky mantra is that many failures turn out to be architectural in nature, are not easy to fix and can all too easily escape notice or, worse, be ignored. Meanwhile, security teams, for the most part, have been stuck in a legacy mindset of striving to keep things as simple and as consistent as possible, Erkang observes.

And this, he argues, is where threat actors foment chaos. It seems ludicrous, but in one sense it’s easier than ever for malicious hackers to get deep access, steal data, spread ransomware, disrupt infrastructure and gain long-run unauthorized access.

Zheng

“There’s a fundamental disconnect between what the business wants and what the security team wants,” Erkang told me. “And this is where the chaos comes from . . . the bad guy hackers aren’t necessarily taking advantage of the complexity; they’re really taking advantage of this disconnect.”

Embracing complexity

The opportunity, going forward then, is for security to jump fully onboard the digital transformation bandwagon.

Legacy defenses at the gateway, firewall, endpoint and application levels must be rearchitected and scaled-up. That’s what a passel of emerging security frameworks like Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA,) Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP,) Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) are all about. Network security must be architected to effectively blunt non-stop malicious probing and cut-off the breaches enabled in a fast-and-risky operating environment.

At the same time, the expansion of the attack surface somehow needs to be slowed — and ultimately reversed. And this is where CAASM technology and practices come in – by fostering cyber hygiene on the ground floor.

Erkang is in the camp making the argument that security teams have an opportunity to lead the way by not merely tolerating complexity but by embracing it. “Security needs to focus on supporting innovation and advancement by understanding complexity; this is now possible with data, with automation and with an engineering mindset,” he says.

Anything and everything that supports any element of digital operations ought to be considered a cyber asset that needs constant care and feeding — with security top of mind, he says. CAASM technology leverages APIs to make it possible for security teams to impose context on the ephemeral connections flying between things like microservices, virtual storage and hosted services.

With context, granular policies can then be set in place and enforced. Machine learning and automation can be brought to bear in a way that infuses security without unduly hindering agility. A lot can be gained by simply imposing wise configuration of all cyber assets, Erkang says. What’s more, this same level of granular analysis and policy enforcement can — and should — be directed at identifying, monitoring and patching software vulnerabilities, he argues.

Taking the security angle

In one sense, taming complexity is all about understanding context. Erkang makes a strong argument that the best way for an organization to gain actionable understanding of its cyber assets in a fast-and-risky operating environment is to come at it from the security perspective.

Erkang gave me the example of a company seeking to take stock of its cloud data stores. Let’s say an organization wants to more proactively manage its Amazon Web Services S3 buckets. JupiterOne, in this scenario, would assemble and maintain a detailed catalogue of the configuration status of all these assets.

Granular policies could then be enforced that consider the sensitivity of data held in any given S3 bucket, as well as the associated access privileges. These are privileges that often are allowed by default to cascade across several tiers of user groups — in support of the go-fast-and-break mindset. Tightening these privileges with just the right touch shrinks the attack surface.

According to Gartner, CAASM capabilities can help companies “improve basic security hygiene by ensuring security controls, security posture and asset exposure are understood and remediated across the environment.”

It strikes me that the beauty of this is that improving visibility is more about creating operational effectiveness, strengthening security and lowering risk for organizations is also paving the way for more effective cyber asset management.

“Security needs to transform from an enforcing function to a business enabling and a wellness function,” Erkang says. “Understanding your cyber assets and how all the dots connect can be the starting point to proactively manage different functions, not just within security, but also outside of security, as well.”

It’s notable that an unprecedented number of fresh security frameworks are vying for traction at the moment. For company decision-makers, this can be confusing. But the effort to sort things and determine what works best for their organization is well worth it. This is all part of raising the security bar. CAASM could be a cornerstone. I’ll keep watch and keep reporting.

Acohido

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.

(LW provides consulting services to the vendors we cover.)

Defending companies as they transition to cloud-first infrastructures has become a very big problem – but it’s certainly not an unsolvable one.

Coming Wed., May 18: How security teams can help drive business growth — by embracing complexity. 

The good news is that a long-overdue transition to a new attack surface and security paradigm is well underway, one built on a fresh set of cloud-native security frameworks and buttressed by software-defined security technologies.

It strikes me that the security systems we will need to carry us forward can be divided into two big buckets: those that help organizations closely monitor network traffic flying across increasingly cloud-native infrastructure and those that help them keep their critical system configurations in shipshape.

There’s a lot percolating in this second bucket, of late. A bevy of cybersecurity vendors have commenced delivering new services to help companies gain visibility into their cyber asset environment, and remediate security control and vulnerability gaps continuously. This is the long-run path to slowing the expansion of a modern attack surface.

“The challenge is that cyber assets are exploding out of control and security teams are having a hard time getting a grasp on what’s going on,” says Ekrang Zheng, founder and CEO of JupiterOne, a Morrisville, NC-based asset visibility platform. “But at the same time, because everything is now software-defined, we actually can approach this problem with a data-driven and an automation-driven mechanism.”

JupiterOne is in a group of cybersecurity vendors that are innovating new technology designed to help companies start doing what they should have done before racing off to migrate everything to the cloud. What happened was that digital transition shifted into high gear without anyone giving due consideration to the security gaps they were creating.

The need to start doing this is glaring; so the rise of specialized technology to get this done is a welcomed development.

Indeed, research firm Gartner very recently created yet another cybersecurity acronym for this emerging class of asset visibility platforms  and practices: cyber asset attack surface management, or CAASM. Gartner lists JupiterOne, Brinqa, AirTrack Software, Axonius, Panaseer and Sevco Security as leading suppliers of CAASM systems.

The common denominator among CAASM vendors is that they provide a centralized platform that can help companies attain meaningful, actionable visibility of their system configurations and vulnerability patching — across the breadth of their cloud-native, hybrid-cloud, and multi-cloud networks.

There’s really no longer any excuse for any organization to lack visibility into how their cyber assets are intermeshing, moment-to-moment, and whether this is occurring according to established best practices.

I’ve had a couple of deep discussions with JupiterOne about this. A drill-down is coming tomorrow in a news analysis column and podcast. Stay tuned.

Acohido

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.

(LW provides consulting services to the vendors we cover.)

Cybersecurity has never felt more porous. You are no doubt aware of the grim statistics:

•The average cost of a data breach rose year-over-year from $3.86 million to $4.24 million in 2021, according to IBM.

•The majority of cyberattacks result in damages of $500,000 or more, Cisco says.

•A sobering analysis by Cybersecurity Ventures forecasts that the global cost of ransomware attacks will reach $265 billion in 2031.

•The FBI reports that 3,000-4,000 cyberattacks are counted each day.

That’s just a sample of what is obvious to anyone in the industry: we’re in a war with cybercriminals, and we can hardly say we’re winning.

The vulnerabilities of internet security, once mostly a nuisance, have become dangerous and costly. Data privacy breaches expose sensitive details about customers, staff, and company financials. Security software may have been a satisfactory product at the turn of the century, but despite massive levels of investment, many experts now realize that it is not adequate for dealing with contemporary threats.

We reached this point of friction because of the compound effect of two shortcomings. One, security was too often treated as an afterthought by the industry, taking a backseat to a device’s speed, functionality, and design. Security remains an added expense that isn’t easy to market, especially when third-party software solutions have been so widely adopted.

But those software choices have proven to be lacking in dependability and often require patches or upgrades that are costly to the end user. Second, the design of security solutions struggled to scale up properly or adapt to the technological changes in the industry, especially in disaggregated compute networks.

Sirineni

Meanwhile the attack surface keeps broadening with the increasing interconnectivity of services, product chains, and user interfaces. Seeing the flaws continue year after year, the industry began linking authentication of valid software components to the underlying hardware, or the “root of trust”.

This approach allows for compromised software to be identified during the authentication process. However, hackers have attacked unsecured hardware and compromised this root. Thus, secure implementations are critical.

Compounding issues is the nature of threat response: it’s reactive, searching for known threats, while cybercriminals regularly devise new, surreptitious methods to avoid detection. Too frequently, security upgrades occur only after successful attacks have taken place, and most fixes are not sufficient to stand up to a new type of attack.

The good news is, artificial intelligence is here and is showing great promise to deliver what the market needs, that is, pre-emptive and proactive threat detection. In fact, AI is on the verge of providing a remedy for problems that have seemed insurmountable. New AI-based applications are poised to be game-changers for cybersecurity.

Implementing security solutions, such as secure hardware root-of-trust and proactive AI in a piecemeal approach and through multiple compute processor vendors, creates complexity and increases the attack surface for cybercriminals. That can cause deficiencies because of varying implementation quality.

Ideally, these security measures can be offloaded to a dedicated security co-processor that would reside in the control and management plane, separated from the data plane of the main processors. Such a co-processor would be positioned to act as a security watchguard for the entire system and provide a pre-emptive measure to fight cybercrime.

At Axiado, we believe an AI-driven trusted control/compute unit, or TCU, provides the level of protection the data-communications industry is demanding. The TCU is designed as a stand-alone processor that will reside on a motherboard next to a CPU, GPU or other compute engine.

This security-by-design solution for the control and management plane is based on proprietary Axiado technology, including Secure Vault™ (a secure hardware root-of-trust, cryptography engine and secure key/certificate storage), Secure AI™ (a pre-emptive threat-detection hardware engine), and firewall advancements.

Hardware with a TCU included will allow companies to pre-emptively detect threats and minimize the endless and often inadequate number of security patches they have been forced to choose for years.

Cybercriminals are nimble, use updated software, and are often determined. With an unprecedented number of attacks inundating global databases, it is the time to end threats with an AI-assisted hardware solution that denies cybercriminals entry into networks and the precious data they store.

About the essayist. Gopi Sirineni is the CEO of Axiado, which supplies advanced technologies to secure the hardware root of trust.