The Defense Department has a challenge: How can servicemembers perform command and control using edge devices without risking the enterprise?
The linchpin in obtaining that capability is zero trust, said Jared Shepard, president and CEO of Hypori. In fact, Shepard said, the importance of zero trust for edge devices extends to nearly every domain, not just that of DoD.
“The world is changing. If you look at internet traffic now, there’s more internet traffic — significantly so — generated by mobile devices,” Shepard said during Federal News Network’s DoD Modernization Exchange. “People spend more time on their mobile devices than they do on any other device.”
The difference for DoD, he added, comes from the need “to enable communications securely, knowing that they have adversaries or nation state actors who are constantly trying to exploit information.”
“Hypori’s solution protects sensitive data in mobile devices with a zero trust methodology,” Shepard said.
“We decided to address the edge device … by essentially not allowing it to interact with the data,” he explained. “No data in transit, no data at rest on the edge device.” Hypori instead proceeds from the assumption that an edge device is already compromised, per the tenets of zero trust.
Therefore, all the device does is render pixels of the data, he said, adding that the device is never actually in possession of the data. Users see the data represented in the device display, but no data on the device means no data processing can happen there either.
Therefore an adversary hijacking a device would get little, Shepard said.
“Even if they could, in real time, intercept the entire image from start to finish,” he said, “all they would get is an encrypted picture of what you were looking at, at the time. They’d never actually be in possession of the data.”
Designed for secure collaboration on smartphones
The Hypori software “was built for a unique mission set in the Department of Defense,” Shepard said, “and has grown outside of that.” In effect, it renders mobile devices as remote terminals, almost in the mainframe model, he said. He called it a “virtual mobile infrastructure.”
“You’re essentially getting a picture of the data that you’re interacting with, pixel-by-pixel encrypted, writing over itself constantly,” he said. Hypori works on a “highly modified version of a mutual transport layer security, or mTLS, encrypted tunnel.”
Each device interacts with applications in the cloud, meaning users must be connected and have a reasonable quality network available. Because only changes in data are transmitted back and forth — Shepard called them delta pixels — the Hypori solution minimizes bandwidth requirements and is architected to overcome packet latency.
The benefits come from the ability to enable secure field collaboration without a lot of specific hardware, Shepard said. And it’s an approach that meshes well with the bring-your-own-device policy that’s already gaining ascendancy in the U.S. armed forces, he said.
“But also think about MPE, or mission partner environments,” Shepard said. Partners may include armed forces from several nations, nongovernment organizations, volunteers and contractors.
“How do you allow them all to collaborate in the same environment in a rapid way? Well, you know what? They all have smartphones,” he said. “Instead of us having to furnish and buy equipment, radios, laptops, everything else like that, for all these participating entities, you just simply tell them to bring their smartphones.”
He added, users create accounts by scanning a QR code and “now, all of a sudden, they’re collaborating in your secure environment.”
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