SBIR Phase I: Performant Distributed Ledgers for Cybersecurity Applications

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是推进一种新的、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、物联网设备、传感器等等。企业正在转向使用混合云部署，将公共云与私有网络和边缘网络混合在一起。此外，企业正在部署各种开放架构，以支持移动访问、自动化部署工作流和应用程序架构，如微服务、物联网飞地和传感器网络。随着企业越来越多地使用API将这些不同的网络元素连接在一起，API安全性成为任何企业网络安全战略的关键因素。该公司提议的API安全平台利用私有和许可的分布式账本网络（DLN）作为其产品的核心。实际上，这个DLN支持为api提供第一个多因素身份验证（MFA）实现。为了在不牺牲安全保障的情况下实时满足API认证的规模和延迟需求，所提出的DLN必须在存储和处理方面都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精简、灵活的扩展和编排，以及更高的性能。该SBIR第一阶段项目建议通过发现和评估在身份验证应用范围内提高DLN性能的方法来推进这一基础区块链框架。该项目将衡量和比较DLN平台潜在进步的有效性，包括：1)区块链网络的横向扩展，即改变网络中对等节点或其他组件的数量；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开发一种高性能、可扩展的基于dlt的安全产品的生产级模型，该产品可以满足高性能云计算、嵌入式工业控制系统和传感器网络等广泛的场景。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.