SBIR Phase I: Performant Distributed Ledgers for Cybersecurity Applications

SBIR 第一阶段：网络安全应用的高性能分布式账本

• 批准号: 2031675
• 负责人: Anusha Iyer
• 金额: $ 25.5万
• 依托单位: Corsha, Inc.
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-05-15 至 2022-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2031675&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SBIR; Phase; Performant; Distributed; Ledgers

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project is to advance a novel, distributed ledger-based technology to improve Application-Program Interfaces (APIs) security for enterprises. APIs are the way that machines communicate with each other, where these machines may be servers, docker containers, IoT devices, sensors, and more. Enterprises are moving to using hybrid cloud deployments, mixing public cloud with private and edge networks. Further, enterprises are deploying a wide range of open architectures that support mobile access, automated deployment workflows, and application architectures like microservices, IoT enclaves, and sensor networks. Increasingly as an enterprise turns to APIs to stitch these diverse network elements together, API security is a critical element of any enterprise’s cybersecurity strategy. The company’s proposed API security platform leverages a private and permissioned distributed ledger network (DLN) at the heart of its product. In fact, this DLN enables provision of the first implementation of multi-factor authentication (MFA) for APIs. To meet the scale and latency requirements of API authentication in real-time without sacrificing security guarantees, the proposed DLN must be highly performant and efficient in both storage and processing. This SBIR-funded research seeks to advance DLN technology but is also more broadly applicable to the advancement of enterprise applications of distributed ledgers that would benefit from pruning, flexible scaling and orchestration, and heightened performance. This SBIR Phase I project proposes to advance this foundational blockchain framework by discovering and evaluating approaches to elevate performance of the DLN in the scope of authentication application. The project will measure and compare the effectiveness of potential advancements to the DLN platform, including: 1) Horizontal scaling of the blockchain network, i.e. varying the number of peers or other components in the network, 2). Pruning of the blockchain to only keep relevant and necessary portions of ledger data, i.e. leading to a more efficient ledger access without sacrificing deep verification. The research work will extend modeling and simulation infrastructure to pattern and measure real-world, at-scale scenarios. The research proposed here will have a broad impact to DLT research and serve as a blueprint for production-grade ledger-based technologies to help enable use-cases where the barrier to entry is cost, performance, and/or scalability. The company will utilize these research findings to develop a production-grade model for a performant, scalable DLT-based security product that can meet scenarios as expansive as high-performance cloud computing, and as granular as embedded, industrial control systems and sensor networks.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）项目更广泛的影响/商业潜力是推进一种新颖的、基于分布式账本的技术，以提高企业的应用程序接口（API）安全性。 API是机器相互通信的方式，这些机器可能是服务器、Docker容器、IoT设备、传感器等。 企业正在转向使用混合云部署，将公共云与私有和边缘网络混合在一起。 此外，企业正在部署广泛的开放式架构，支持移动的访问、自动化部署工作流程以及微服务、物联网飞地和传感器网络等应用程序架构。 随着企业越来越多地转向API来将这些不同的网络元素缝合在一起，API安全性是任何企业网络安全战略的关键要素。 该公司提出的API安全平台在其产品的核心利用了私有和许可的分布式账本网络（DLN）。 事实上，这个DLN支持为API提供多因素身份验证（MFA）的第一个实现。 为了满足实时API身份验证的规模和延迟要求而不牺牲安全保证，所提出的DLN必须在存储和处理方面具有高性能和高效率。 这项由SBIR资助的研究旨在推进DLN技术，但也更广泛地适用于分布式账本的企业应用程序的发展，这些应用程序将受益于修剪，灵活的扩展和编排以及提高的性能。这个SBIR第一阶段项目提出通过发现和评估在身份验证应用范围内提升DLN性能的方法来推进这个基础区块链框架。 该项目将衡量和比较DLN平台的潜在进步的有效性，包括：1）区块链网络的横向扩展，即改变网络中对等点或其他组件的数量，2）。修剪区块链，只保留分类账数据的相关和必要部分，即在不牺牲深度验证的情况下实现更有效的分类账访问。 研究工作将扩展建模和仿真基础设施，以模式和测量真实世界的大规模场景。 本文提出的研究将对DLT研究产生广泛的影响，并作为生产级基于分类账的技术的蓝图，以帮助实现进入障碍是成本、性能和/或可扩展性的用例。该公司将利用这些研究成果，为基于DLT的高性能、可扩展的安全产品开发生产级模型，该产品可以满足高性能云计算等扩展场景，以及嵌入式、该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查进行评估，被认为值得支持的搜索.