Cybersecurity in the 21st Century

IIT AGNE conducted a speaker panel and discussion on the challenges, threats and horizons in providing cybersecurity for critical infrastructure on May 18th at the Boston University Innovation Lab (BUILD). This event, which was was organized by IIT AGNE executive committee members Alkesh Shah & IP Singh, featured three speakers with depth and experience in this area. They were Mr. Allen Rogers, VP, IBM Resilient; Mr. Charles Munson, Cybersecurity researcher and expert at MIT Lincoln Labs; and Mr. Chandra Pandey, founder and CEO, SECEON. The event  was moderated by Mr. Vivek Pandit, Senior Director, Nuance. 

Mr. Allen Rogers started the event by describing the explosive growth in cybersecurity from its beginnings 20+ years back, and the limitations it brings. Allen started as an electrical engineer who created and deployed one of the first firewalls to prevent intrusions, which is a defensive move. Since then threats have multiplied as the Internet has evolved and gone global with sophisticated teams of hackers located in multiple countries, who now use automated tools to conduct intrusions and to analyze data.

Most institutions do not have sufficient people to monitor and prevent intrusions for their infrastructure, which can happen at any time. Hence the SOAR infrastructure (Security Orchestration Automation and Response) has been created by IBM to provide a scaled appropriate response to cyberintrusions, which involve automatically detecting incidents using AI technologies such as Watson and mounting an appropriate response depending on the scale of the incident.

Mr. Charles Munson described the need for security and trust, as information and services migrate to the Clouds and is accessed by various devices. There is a need for authentication to prevent the danger of spoofing due to vulnerabilities in the infrastructure. Most devices, use a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chip that contains a set of encrypted keys to ensure that the right hardware is being used to access information. However these may not be available on virtual machines, incompatible with the hardware, or too slow on the Cloud hardware, which is being constantly accessed by millions of devices.

The KeyLime system developed by Charles and his team at Lincoln Labs, is an Advanced Tenant Manager, which serves as a transparent security layer for data and services on the Cloud. KeyLime is transparent to all users, performant with large number of nodes with low latency, and cloud integrated by design, working on both “bare metal” and virtualized hardware. It represents a critical step forward in Cloud security and is expected to become part of the infrastructure of the Cloud everywhere.

Mr. Chandra Pandey, next took an expansive view of the limitations in cybersecurity environment and the need for a sophisticated platform and future oriented approach. The conventional defensive approaches at access points no longer work, called “the death of the perimeter”, in the face of sophisticated cybercriminals and nation states, who outsource and automated cybercrime as a service. There explosive growth in devices and environments to protect and a proliferation of cybersecurity tools that are uncoordinated with a severe scarcity of qualified cybersecurity professionals, and need for compliance with regulatory requirements.This is especially true of small and medium businesses (SMBs) who need cybersecurity measures but may not have the resources and expertise to protect themselves. To address these issues, the aiSIEM cybersecurity platform from SECEON provides a comprehensive set of cybersecurity tools that include SOAR,AI/ML, Security Analytics, Threat Intelligence, Remediation to fill in the gaps. SECEON is growing rapidly and looking for bright graduates for their workforce.

This was followed by a lively discussion with the audience on topics of interest, such as the professional path for a young graduate in cybersecurity, the need for security on mobile platforms such as vehicles and smart devices.  

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