Increasing the availability of state-of-the-art cybersecurity
Cybercrime exacts vast social and economic costs. The Yahoo hack of 2016 exposed 1 billion user accounts, and the Equifax breach in 2017 affected over 150 million customers. Other recent major attacks have included the 2017 WannaCry and NotPetya cyberattacks, which shut down a range of large organisations like Maersk, Renault, and the NHS in the United Kingdom. With such large and resourceful organisations proving vulnerable to cybercrime, new solutions are required for secure data processing, compliant with increasingly stringent regulation. Existing cybersecurity solutions can be complex to manage, provide limited flexibility and are still beset with various security weaknesses. The EU-supported project ARCAone, hosted by CYSEC, has developed a versatile and scalable cybercrime risk mitigation solution (ARCA) that securely stores sensitive data and runs critical software in a trusted environment. “Our solution offers organisations an innovative, easy-to-install and cost-effective way to adapt to changing security and business requirements,” says Yacine Felk, CYSEC chief operating officer. Having secured the intellectual property rights for the system, significant sales have already been generated with partners such as crypto-custody experts METACO, GEOSATIS with expertise in industrial Internet of Things (IoT) and Astrocast involved in space applications. CYSEC has also become a member of the Confidential Computing Consortium, set up by The Linux Foundation to provide a secure cloud-based platform for data exchange. The company was also recently awarded a tech growth loan from the Foundation for Technological Innovation.
Building a trusted solution
ARCA provides a Trusted Execution Environment that can be deployed both on-site and within cloud configurations. When deployed on-site, the hardware ensures the secure hosting of sensitive applications, while the system’s software allows organisations to securely manage a range of tasks and assets. These include: access keys, encryption and decryption functions, as well as digital signatures and other authentication services relying on cryptographic algorithms. To date, the solution has been successfully deployed in a range of industrial environments, addressing different use cases such as: crypto-custody and digital asset management in finance, and industrial IoT for critical infrastructures and for space applications. “As well as enhanced security, we have built a system which provides a new level of flexibility and agility. We were actually surprised by how quickly applications can be deployed in our secured environment,” explains Felk.
On-site and in the cloud
One prediction is that in 2021, cybercrime will cost the world twice what it did in 2015. These costs equate to lost productivity, stolen money, theft of intellectual property, theft of personal and financial data, fraud, post-attack business disruption, forensic investigation, restoration of hacked data and systems, and reputational damage. By building a safe environment for the secure storage and execution of sensitive data, from cryptocurrencies to cryptographic keys, ARCA contributes to accelerating the digital transformation without compromising security. After the first generation of ARCA, called ARCAone, went into production in 2019, the ARCA solution was deployed to customers on-site. This year, the team will concentrate on cloud deployment and Infrastructure as a Service/Computing as a Service arrangements. Additionally, the team will further enhance security through crypto services which embed state-of-the-art technologies, such as post-quantum algorithms.
Keywords
ARCAone, security, hacking, cybersecurity, cybercrime, cyberattacks, cybercriminals, digitisation, sensitive data, Internet of Things, encryption
