Enterprises are not willing to concede that extracting the full value of user data and preserving data privacy is an either/or proposition, and for that reason there is increased interest in implementing a personal data service (PDS).

The project is important, Ringle emphasized, because it will help “change the balance between the aggressors and the defenders.” “We are sitting ducks in a way. By banding together, by having these colleges and universities work with another and with Galois, it gives us a leg up. We can’t make the gap disappear entirely, but if we can close it so that we can react almost as fast as they can launch attacks, then that mitigates the damage that their attacks can do, and that makes us much more powerful in terms of defending our campuses and all the data that we manage.”

“Zero-day attacks require flaws in software,” Galois’ Wick said. “No matter what your ratio is between lines of code in a system and the number of flaws in a system, less software on a system means less lines of code, which means fewer flaws.”

When systems simply can’t meet existing security mandates, Archer advises developing new mandates from the ground up. “NIST offers a process for security assessment that flows from an understanding of adversarial capabilities, types and sensitivities of data or controls to be protected, and available budget,” Archer said. “Following this process, you can identify potential security risks specific to the system and then develop practices to secure the system against those risks becoming vulnerabilities.”

“Privacy, especially when it comes to data, can be difficult to pin down. Security measures are key, but when done wrong can add to the difficulty, making it hard for authorized users to effectively access the data they need. So the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been funding research efforts to develop technologies that could help bridge troublesome privacy gaps.”

strong encryption is not the real issue that faces law enforcement now. In reality, strong encryption has been available for decades. The real issue that government agencies are facing today is actually easy, default, and ubiquitous crypto. Ease of use and security are both in the interest of the public, and in line with the White House cybersecurity priorities.

We know application security is one of the most important aspects of data security, but if software teams are moving more quickly than ever to push apps out, security and quality assurance needs to be along for the process. The flip side is minimum apps and features could mean less attack surface. To get some answers on the state of mobile app security and securing the MVP, we reached out to Isaac Potoczny-Jones research lead, computer security with a computer security research and development firm Galois.

With DDoS tools and hacking-as-a-service now available for purchase at virtually any Dark Web marketplace and effectively being advertised through public attacks, companies are understandably concerned. Even when caught midstream, it’s difficult to respond before servers start failing and other, more sophisticated attacks take aim at critical corporate data. As a result, dealing with DDoS has become a top priority for organizations like the DHS, which just awarded a $1.7 million contract to tech company Galois in hopes of strengthening DDoS defense.