Breakthrough Cryptography Introduces 'Cyber Herd Immunity'

Deep Tech solution shifts security so that to breach even a single record, an attacker needs to break a global network of organizations, one at a time

Sydney, Au., Oct. 20, 2021 –Tide Foundation, an award-winning deep tech cybersecurity start-up, is curing the cyber breach pandemic with the radical idea of delivering ‘cyber herd immunity’ to any organization. Tide’s unique decentralized design completely shifts the cyber protection strategies for companies so that no one individual or organization controls the “keys to the kingdom,” nor is there a single vulnerability that can completely compromise the system. Essentially the power of the many protects the one.

Tide recently signed an agreement with a leading global technology services company to address the threat of cyber breaches that occur almost daily and to build out the adoption of this innovative security model. The first targeted industries include health, BFSI (banking, financial services, and insurance), and the critical operational technology (OT) infrastructure space. Additionally, Tide and the integrator are working with a university to use Tide’s capability to grant students absolute control over their records in a way that can be safely shared with other academic facilities.

In the Tide solution, access keys to each of an organization’s digital assets (e.g., data, funds, cyber-physical infrastructure) are fragmented across a host of servers managed by many different organizations. To breach even a single asset an attacker needs to breach the organization holding it, then locate and breach every other organization holding the fragments of the correct key. For a mass breach, this effort would need to be replicated for each individual asset, thus providing exponentially greater security for all -- from SMEs to large enterprises.

The new paradigm: In math we trust

The global economy’s increasing reliance on digital systems and remote workforces have drastically increased the attack surface threatening to compromise organizations. In 2021, cyber breaches will inflict an estimated $6 trillion in damages. This dangerous and expensive crisis is expected to reach $10.5 trillion annually by 2025. Meanwhile, companies pour resources into continuous fortification, but the damage is compounding, calling for a drastic innovative solution to address the global problem.
 
“Security providers like SolarWinds, Kaseya and others that were seriously compromised were considered the most trusted solutions in the market. But this trust became the very vulnerability exploited in their respective supply chain attacks, because their solutions were granted access to the most sensitive resources of the organizations they were protecting. This resulted in some of the most damaging breaches in history,” said Michael Loewy, Co-founder, Tide. “To really solve the problem, we need an entirely new way of thinking.” 

Tide's ground-breaking cryptography, named “blind secret processing,” guarantees the network participants are completely blind to the keys, the processes being used and the assets they unlock, while allowing the entire herd to operate as a cohesive, unimpeachable guardian.

“Today’s most progressive cybersecurity protection schemes rely on so-called Zero Trust, where all users must be authenticated, authorized and continuously validated,” said Distinguished Professor Willy Susilo, a cybersecurity scientist and an IEEE fellow who has published more than 400 papers, as well as a Tide advisor. “Ironically, this process is handled by a centralized mechanism that requires complete trust. Tide’s breakthrough simply takes trust out of the equation completely -- in favor of verifiable math -- so that the mechanism has no visibility into the sensitive processes it performs.” 

“This unique core capability can be seamlessly integrated into any existing platform or managed service, guaranteeing real privacy protection, resolving data ownership conundrums, unlocking secure information sharing or just cementing a new verifiable-trust relationship with consumers,” said Yuval Hertzog, Co-founder, Tide, who led R&D for a decade in one of Israel’s most prestigious cyber-intelligence units.

Beyond the enterprise market, Tide has embedded its technology into an open-source Identity and Access Management System which it will release to the developer community shortly. “With a few lines of code, any product or platform regardless of its scale will enjoy the same level of protection as the internet becomes a giant shield,” added Hertzog. 

About Tide Foundation
Tide is a deep-tech venture developing a new transformative, true zero-trust capability that offers even the smallest business the protection of an endless network of organizations against cyber threats of any scale. Led by a team with leadership experience in the military and enterprise, Tide is backed by a high-profile advisory and investor base of tech veterans, cryptography professors, and former policy makers. Tide is a research partner of RMIT University and the University of Wollongong and has been awarded a National Research Council grant, been championed by global bodies like the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority, presented at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021, and has won numerous deep tech awards. 

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