Reducing risks to critical government infrastructure

In this day and age of digital growth, exponential expansion of digital infrastructure, and the digital threats that arise with it, the need for an all-encompassing solution is critical. Citizens of any government should be confident that the personal data they share with their government is safe and well protected.

Governments cannot allow obsolete and leaky infrastructure to compromise the security of their data. Once the public becomes reluctant to share their data, based on the perception that it’s handled insecure, their willingness to join their government in the transition to a more digital world drops, resulting in friction and distrust. This will severely slow down the process in the long run. Trust should be the main driver, and once it’s lost, winning it back is an uphill battle.

If critical citizen data, stored on federal data center infrastructure is compromised, the consequences are significant. Instead of viewing the government as the guardian of their sensible data, fueling their willingness to keep sharing their data, their perception changes. The human mind is wired to associate the breach with an omnipresent feeling of distrust, anxiety and even betrayal. These emotional drivers cannot be ignored since they impact every contact between the government and its citizens and are devastating to the relationship between the two.

Data breaches as a national security threat.

The US department of Justice defines a breach as “the loss of control, compromise, unauthorized disclosure, unauthorized acquisition, access for an unauthorized purpose, or other unauthorized access, to data, whether physical or electronic.

The further digitization of our society, if the current infrastructure is maintained, leaves many openings for bad actors on a broader scale. In modern warfare, for hostile nations and rogue states, hacking has become a main component. Obtaining critical data from another country has devastating consequences. Once they obtained it, it’s theirs forever, leaving critical infrastructure open for attacks. The security of these systems is often inadequate, in some cases even leaky and wide open.

In a recent 2022 Pwn2Own ethical hacking competition, two security researchers breached ICONICS Genesis64, a software designed for operators to use industrial machines, in mere seconds. In contrast, it took them three weeks to hack an iPhone way back in 2012.

Another example is the cyberattack on Ukraine’s power grid in 2015. This incident put half of the Ivano-Frankivsk region in the dark for six hours. And while these could cause inconveniences and monetary losses during normal times, these attacks could have graver consequences when executed before an invasion.

According to Statista: “The ongoing digitization of all aspects of modern life has not stopped to exclude the government. With increasing online and data usage, government databases have positioned themselves as major targets for hackers and acts of cyber warfare. According to author Richard Clarke, cyber warfare is defined as actions by a nation-state to penetrate another nation’s computers or networks to cause damage or disruption.

Broader definitions also include non-state actors, such as terrorist groups, companies, political or ideological extremist groups, criminal organizations, and hacktivists. In the United States, cyberattacks from these sources have been a cause for concern for years, as not only the frequency of data breaches has increased, but also their complexity and (economic) implications. In 2018, the United States was the country most severely affected by cybercrime in terms of financial damage: industry experts estimate that the U.S. government faced costs of over 13.7 billion U.S. dollars as a result of cyberattacks.”

How do data centers process data today?

CPU-based architectures in datacenters predominantly perform two tasks. Processing the data and securing it ( encryption/decryption ) With the massive amounts of data that need processing, the vast majority of the chip’s capacity is deployed for processing.

Hence, the danger lies in the disrupted balance between digital growth and expansion, and security. When the amount of data increases and surpasses their capacity, data centers must choose. Based on their current, obsolete infrastructure they must deploy all their computing power to either process the data or secure it.

From a sustainability perspective, this is a dead end too. To keep up with the increase in data, DC developers build more data centers, based on the same principle, to add capacity to process more data and secure it.

Quantum computers, and their ability to hack everything.

Although currently the development of quantum computing is still in its early phase, the threat of it being used for malicious purposes is very real. It’s widely known that bad actors are hacking databases that are secure now and saving them, to be hacked with a quantum computer in 5 or ten years.

In a new national security memorandum, the White House instructs federal agencies to prepare to shift from the encryption algorithms used today to secure communications on the internet and other networks to new algorithms resistant to attack by a quantum computer.

The all-encompassing solution is real and it’s here.

And it cuts both ways. BrightAI offers unprecedented, post-quantum security, based on the acceleration of the Wireguard protocol, which is introduced in the Linux kernel, and embraced by large corporates such as Google and Amazon.

It offers unprecedented advantages, like:

Post-quantum security
Increase in speed and throughput
Ultra-low latency
90% reduction in electricity use for cooling in data centers.
Easy to deploy based on current data center infrastructure
Massive savings on both CAPEX and OPEX.

Based on FPGA technology, cryptographic algorithms, and cutting-edge innovative thinking by the world’s leading FPGA architects, it doesn’t only protect data to the highest possible standards, but it also has a dramatic sustainability impact, by saving 90% on the electricity consumption for cooling, the largest expense in datacenter exploitation.