Bright Plaza, Inc.
Business
Confidential Bright Plaza, Inc. 2017
Bright plaza believes hardware encryption in self-protecting storage devices provide many significant security, usability, and reliability advantages over any known alternatives for protecting programs and data. These devices are commonly called “self-encrypting drives” or “SEDs.”
Our company’s mission is to further increase awareness and adoption of SED technology globally. We accomplish our mission through our business in software and IP licensing, software R&D, and technical and legal marketing services.
Hardware-based SED encryption recently got a lot of press for the iPhone because, with strong user authentication, SED encryption is not crackable, even by the manufacturer of the SED. Ultimately, the successful attack was actually through guessing the weak passphrase used by the killers, not by cracking the encryption. If the killers had used a strong password, the data would still be hidden from anybody left alive.
Not touched in the popular press is that already over a billion people a day use SEDs. For example, all data stored by Google search is stored on Industry Standard SEDs, namely Trusted Computing Group – TCG – Opal or Enterprise Drives. iPhones, iPads, and modern Android phones and pads are also SEDs.
Doubtless, as was the case with the iPhone, almost no one notices they are already using SEDs. Yet billions of people are already recipients of the security and reliability advantages of hardware encryption over hard-to-use and unreliable software encryption.
Every major manufacturer of non-volatile storage devices such as hard disk drives and solid state flash drives offer TCG Opal and Enterprise SEDs either universally or as an option. SEDs are in fact ubiquitous already, but in a number of markets they are not well adopted because of lack of the attractive glue software, and the focused education and the technical and legal marketing needed for customers in all industries to appreciate the privacy, usability, and security benefits of SEDs.
While a billion people a day use SEDs, there is still an enormous untapped market for additional application software more people can see and appreciate. We provide full service to increase adoption of SED drives in areas where the adoption is just beginning. The services include software R&D and technical and legal marketing services. Our customers are companies that benefit from increasing the market reach for SEDs. They generally include SED manufacturers, other SED Software companies wishing to extend their product reach, and industries wishing to deploy SEDs in IT and IoT applications where great software glue is not yet available.
There are two compelling use cases for SEDs.
- Cryptographically protected strong access control to SED protected programs and data.
- Near instantaneous storage device or storage partition re-purposing through cryptographic erasure.
When locked, programs and data are in-practice impossible to access without proper authentication. Furthermore, the storage device can be re-purposed as fast as changing the media encryption keys.
Instead of minute, hours, or, in some cases, days, cryptographic erasure in an SED takes substantially less than a second.
These two use cases, data access control and storage re-purposing, are seen and experienced by people worldwide on the iPhone and newer Android phones (and pads). When you set a password or fingerprint you have given the phone a key-encryption-key for unlocking the SED. When you erase a phone, you are replacing the media-encryption-key itself.
These same people who have no idea about how iPhones, iPads, and many Android phones and pad work, have no idea that SED technology is available for use on laptops and servers equipped with SEDs. Similarly, even people who have experienced the usability advantages of SEDs on smart phones and pads, do not have any idea of the myriad of other software applications possible with SEDs. It is our mission to bring these other glue software applications to market.
Bright Plaza’s SED effort is called the Drive Trust Alliance (DTA). DTA is composed of three core platforms.
GNU Licensed Open Source for support of SEDs. This Open Source supports Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems, SATA, SAS, NVMe, and USB storage interfaces, for Industry Standard Trusted Computing Group Opal and Enterprise Self-Encrypting Drives.
- Our Open Source is GNU Licensed. GNU Licenses are commonplace, including, for example, Linux. Anyone or any entity may make free, commercial or non-commercial, use of our SED Open Source but they must donate modifications back to the public for free use.
- Bright Plaza develops, with our customers, custom, commercial grade, proprietary software which our customers may sell to the end user market or employ in their IoT applications or IT Departments. Like other successful companies, such as Red Hat, Inc., Bright Plaza can enhance its core open source with proprietary modifications, without the obligation to donate the additional software back to our SED Open Source repository.
Open SourceThe Kaje User Authentication and Authorization Cloud Platform. Today, SEDs are often accessed with a text password. There are much more versatile solutions possible that can mitigate against such attacks as insider attacks, viruses, and even keystroke attacks. Kaje (pronounced "cagey" as in 'tricky' ) provides a generalized cognitive testing platform for diverse knowledge proofing and knowledge testing. This technology greatly improves on the well-known deficits of text passwords for authentication and authorization to SED protected programs and data.
The educational web site, www.drivetrust.com, that you are currently on, is dedicated to promoting SEDs of all kinds from TCG Opal laptop drives to iPhones. As an extension of this educational web platform, we also provide technical education and marketing services for SED manufacturers, IT professionals and SED integrators.
Specific Software Initiatives
We have identified a number of areas where existing glue software under-serves an available market for SEDs. This provides our catalog of areas where we are developing new software for the respective commercial markets.
1. Uses of SEDs in IT Endpoint Security and Privacy. SEDs have been available for laptops and desktops for at least a decade, but they are largely not used. For example, Microsoft Bitlocker can use e-Drive which is just a TCG Opal SED, but Bitlocker is rarely actually connected to the SED. People usually use the less useable software Bitlocker. Modern smart phones and pads utilized SEDs for their storage, and these are used but the user authentication is often weak. We believe there are many software and technical marketing opportunities that can provide IT departments of companies and organizations of any size with strong hardware encryption benefits against cyberattacks.
2. Consumer uses of SEDs. Consumers already use SEDs without knowing. We believe there are many opportunities to extend the essential characteristics of consumer adoption which are the strong security and privacy benefits of hardware encryption along with no additional impact on usability (as had already happened with iPhones, and Google and many other cloud suppliers). As a beginning product, Bright Plaza offers potential USB/Attached Storage vendors and IT Departments the only Industry Standard USB SED kit for Windows, Mac and Linux. We call these USB drives "Self-Encrypting Boxes."
3. Specialized High Security Applications. We have a number of customers and partners that are currently developing software for high threat environments. SEDs provide a natural avenue to provide extremely strong protection for data until it is used but the software that is currently available for capitalizing on the potential for SEDs in these scenarios is still just beginning to become available.
4. Digital Discovery and eForensics. In Digital Discovery and eForensic, there are multiple opportunities for changing the legal landscape using SEDs. For example, in handling drives for evidence, the original drive must first be replicated and not used. SEDs provide an outstanding storage device for evidence copies that must be securely distributed in the legal system and ultimately erased under court order.
5. Automotive or Vehicular Security and Privacy. Just as iPhones with strong user authentication give access to a user's data protected otherwise by SED technology, car owners with a car key provides a universally accepted and friendly way to unlock the privacy sensitive data that cars increasingly store. Similarly, when you sell your car (or a company or organization, re-purpose a fleet vehicle), cryptographic erasure of privacy sensitive data should be nearly instantaneous with proper authorization. The software for doing these functions is almost entirely non-existent today despite the fact that nearly all manufacturers of storage devices can offer SEDs for automotive and other vehicular applications. SED technology impacts directly at least 11 of the recent US Government 15 guidance principals for Highly Autonomous Vehicles (https://www.transportation.gov/AV/federal-automated-vehicles-policy-september-2016 ).
6. IoT Security and Privacy. IoT is reaching much further than vehicular security and privacy. But again, the need to secure privacy sensitive data and to clear a device of such data should be available for nearly all IoT application from industrial utility applications to refrigerators. Again, the needed software is largely absent in these areas.
7. Medical Device Security and Privacy. Again, the software for providing the benefits of SED technology in accessing privacy sensitive data on medical devices and re-purposing medical devices quickly, and with great assurance, is almost non-existent today. Laws and Regulations exist throughout much of the world that require encryption of personally identifiable medical information. SED technology is a natural for medical devices. Office grade printers already are equipped, nearly universally, with SEDs. It is simply a matter of the glue software needed to provide these superior capabilities for data encryption across all medical devices.
8. Archival Security and Privacy. Archives that are old enough don't really need to be encrypted, but how old is old enough? With SEDs the encryption is built into the storage device itself. So the SED can be stored on a shelf, and picked up in years later with known industry standard protocols for gaining access to the data.
In Summary
The problem of adoption of SED technology is not the availability of SED devices. In certain markets today, SED adoption is nearly 100%, and this adoption is already on huge global scales. This proves that with the right software glue and the right information, SED adoption can become ubiquitous and well-liked because of the strong, easy to deploy and use, security and privacy guarantees.
The problem addressed by Bright Plaza’s mission is where great software, technical marketing and educational services areas have not yet been developed.
Bright Plaza is the first company to focus exclusively on providing these additional market opportunities for storage device makers, commercial software companies, and organizations wishing to afford themselves of the security, usability, and reliability advantages of SED encryption technology.
