Secured Container Environment, Master Access and Session Control
Ensure container protection at the infrastructure level and access control of the containers.
Ensure container protection at the infrastructure level and access control of the containers.
The usage of containers is becoming very popular as it helps business activities to scale and adapt continuously to new needs. Meanwhile containers offer many advantages, they expose companies to new threats that have to be countered. Threats that can come outside through hardware or software attacks or from inside via unauthorized access to containers. To help face these challenges, Mideye and CYSEC have decided to work together to deliver a simple and effective solution that creates trusted environments to run containers with container access control to block unauthorized people from accessing those containers.
Having a secure environment to run containers is part of the security best practices companies should follow (ex. Nist SP 800-190 recommendations) as well as a role-based access control. The objective of Mideye and CYSEC is to provide a simple efficient solution to ensure those best practices are in place. They do this by combining their respective offerings in container security.
CYSEC delivers a hardened operating system combined with security functions and a secure container orchestrator to contain attack propagation and avoid data breach in containers located on premise, in the cloud and at the edge. The containers can therefore rely on a trustworthy, robust and maintained execution environment meanwhile its operations and performance stay the same. Such a trusted environment is particularly valuable for cloud or edge deployments as it is remotely managed.
“We are very happy to work with CYSEC as it provides secure containers that we can protect access to, either by adding strong authentication or by providing session control. The safest of environments will not help you if the intruder can gain access through the front door. Even the Mideye component can be secured by ARCA Trusted OS”
Jan Sandbacka , Authentication Evangelist at Mideye.
If the environment is trusted, it is also important to control the access of the containers it hosts. This is even truer in case of the solutions in the cloud or at the edge where accesses may arrive from multiple entry points. For this purpose it is important to structurally control the access. The Mideye server supports all kinds of authentication and access control use cases that interest industry companies such as shared account authentication for group accounts, session control for logins to production systems, fall-back to on-prem for critical infrastructure, Assisted Password Reset for fast recovery after ransomware attacks, etc…
“We are enthusiastic to work with Mideye as it provides a complementary element to Arca Trusted OS to protect containers to form a simple, centralized solution for container security”
Luca Gabella, VP Sales Edge Computing at CYSEC.
One of the multiple use cases to apply this combined solution can be for Industrial Automation. The need is growing to increase the number of data sources and introduce complex AI/ML models to improve automation on production lines. Such modern solutions usually adopt container based architecture to facilitate their management and their scalability. The expectations on the business outcomes are obviously high, however the security and confidentiality aspects are as well as relevant. CYSEC and Mideye can offer a solution that secures the container environment and manage their accesses to respect data confidentiality between parties. The infrastructure and the application layers can be as well as segregated to ensure a clear separation of duty.
Generally speaking, such a combined solution fits the needs of companies who have to handle very sensitive data or mission critical applications (ex. critical infrastructures and industrial manufacturers) and need to set up a strong access control to those data and applications.
This collaboration has been made possible through the SynerLeap hub, where both CYSEC and Mideye are esteemed and endorsed members of ABB’s innovation growth hub, which actively facilitates the transfer of innovation across diverse industries.
Martin Olausson, Head of Business Development at SynerLeap powered by ABB, has highlighted the significant positive impact that arises when players unite forces within the partners’ and members’ ecosystem. He expressed his enthusiasm by stating, “We are thrilled to witness the collaboration between two of our exceptional startup members in the area of cyber security, Mideye and CYSEC, as they have jointly developed a value proposition that greatly benefits our ecosystem. Their combined efforts to provide a stronger and more comprehensive offering to the market align perfectly with the activities we aim to foster. This not only enriches our ecosystem but also enhances their own business offerings to other parties.“
CYSEC is a European data security company, based in Lausanne and Paris, providing a software solution in Confidential Computing, which enables companies to secure workloads on distributed infrastructures. The company provides a Trusted Execution Environment for containers and helps them to secure and deploy sensitive data on distributed architecture from Data center to the Cloud to the Edge.
CYSEC’s flagship solution, called «ARCA Trusted OS» is a hardened Linux-based operating system combined with a secure Kubernetes orchestrator providing a trusted runtime platform for containers. ARCA provides cryptographic functions, in order to protect keys, code and data, be it at rest, in transit and in use.
Since its inception in 1999, Mideye has pioneered the area of strong user authentication based on the mobile phone now with added access control. The product, service and patent portfolio is focused on user login with the phone as an additional layer of security. The Mideye authentication service can be applied to any remote access service that requires secure user identification and access control, including Shared / group account authentication, session control, on-prem authentication and Assisted password reset.
By bringing startups, ABB, industrial partners and our customers together through our innovation growth hub SynerLeap, we ignite innovation transfer across industries, ranging from industrial automation, and robotics to grid technologies, smart cities, buildings and transportation technologies. So far, we have created more than 240 collaborations, together with our 190 startup members from 26 countries. SynerLeap brings in up to 4 new members monthly, and one new ABB collaboration is starting every week. Sandvik, Microsoft, Intertek, Hitachi Energy, Epiroc and IBM are just a few examples of our partners that together bring value into our entrepreneurial ecosystem. www.synerleap.com