There is one shared statement amongst today’s cybersecurity experts: evolve or fall against an ever evolving enemy. IT development has been characterized for releasing new and improved systems over time. However, these improvements in user interface and user experience, reliability and quicknesses, and overall system response, have forgotten one crucial aspect : security. It doesn’t mean, though, that big tech companies haven’t paid attention to it, they have just relied on practically the same security standards that have worked throughout years. The little improvements within those standards, unfortunately have been compromised once and again.
The old-school compliance mandates per vertical – FISMA for financials, HIPAA for healthcare etc. aren’t secure anymore and thus they will end up disappearing. Other traditional concepts will be gone too, such as perimeter security, storage-only encryption, access control based on privilege records, authentication that relies on one strong factor or the controversial DMZ zone.
Those security protocols, which are somewhat archaic, will give way to new, advanced and learning protocols, based in new technologies. Two of these, in fact, are the ones that as per their own structure and architecture, are meant to be safe if inserted in any IT system. We are talking about AI and blockchain, two rather disruptive technologies that are reshaping the current landscape of computing.
At the same time, these two technologies are seen as techniques within the IT industry, built upon the strongest security measures.
“Many new techniques will arise through machine learning and weak AIs, especially in intrusion detection and making sense of large-scale monitoring and signal analysis. Many new techniques will arise from advancements in cryptography and collective effort to eliminate poor cryptography. Still, we will have snake-oil products and systems,” said Eugene Pilyankevich, CTO at Cossack Labs, a specialized security company, working with how machine learning capabilities can disrupt the way security is understood.
AI solutions can be embedded to produce a learning security behaviour capable of detecting and eliminating threats, just like humans do, but in a much faster way.
In parallel to AI new solutions, blockchain technology is actually secure per se. This distributed ledger is thought and coded in such a way that it enables the secure storage of millions of data within its platform, leveraging a series of architecture tweaks for it. It is conceived through its proof of work protocol, in which each node/person accounts for all the changes made in the chain, so all modifications have to be approved. Likewise, this system allows for a trustless principle where all transactions are anonymous, but they stay recorded in the chain and a ID will be storage. All of these go towards keeping the integrity of data.
The characteristic that most cybersecurity experts have laid their eyes on is the possibility of building smart contracts within a blockchain platform. Smart contracts not only define the rules and penalties around an agreement in the same way that a traditional contract does, but also automatically enforce those obligations for all parts.
The future will see more of cybersecurity solutions involving blockchain and AI, as these are 2 technologies that are innovating the sector at rapid speed, and are here to stay.
Aghiath Chbib 