Research and Development
Clarity Consulting Corporation develops better solutions for our customers for all aspects of the cyber security field and broader IT technology field in general.
As an introduction, Clarity Consulting does not conduct incremental research at the present time. Instead, we specialize in complex, "breakthrough" innovation research. Within each field of study, we specialize in innovating an entire new generation of technology in a single effort.
We accomplish this using our unique method of reversing the normal R&D process.
Here’s what this means.
First, we employ R&D “generalists”, who by design while highly experienced are not experts in the applicable field of research. These “non-experts” initiate, lead and control our R&D process all the way from team formation, thought seeding, initial concept, and our brainstorming research process up to and including development of our initial proof-of concept design. Our unique approach prevents our deeply specialized subject-matter experts from inadvertently dictating the direction of our R&D process by nature of their deep specializations.
This strategy, along with complementary approaches to other aspects of our R&D process, all but guarantees an "out-of-the-box" solution which virtually always is a generation or more ahead of its time compared to all competitor technologies on the market.
Constant Guardian®
The value proposition of our patented Constant Guardian® cyber security defense technology under development now is its ability to provide Retroactive Cyber Security™ to a high degree of cyber security assurance (>= 98%), without needing software or hardware changes of any kind to the equipment or network segments being protected.
No other technology in the world comes even remotely close to making such claims, never mind succeeds in even halfway actually doing so. The initial release of our technology is aimed at industrial process control facilities, while upcoming adaptions will target large-scale enterprise IT networks, electric smart devices and grids, and embedded hardware chip applications.
Detailed Technical Claims
Here is a list of seven specific technical claims that Clarity Consulting makes for our innovate Constant Guardian® technology.
Our technology is:
1. 100% backwards compatible with existing industrial process control facilities, without modification of any kind. No software is installed, and no configuration changes are made to any computer workstations or network servers whatsoever.
2. Does not require facility human machine interfaces (HMIs) to be even so much as touched. HMIs may remain unpatched; configured with short insecure common passwords (or no passwords); screen consoles may remain unlocked as always; USB ports may remain active for use with memory sticks; and anti-virus software may remain badly out of date -- or not even installed at all. Same as usual for many process control facilities, in other words.
3. Counters counter sophisticated malware that is undetected by anti-virus software, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) or other existing technologies on the marketplace today. This even includes brand new malware brought into the facility on a memory stick and directly introduced into an HMI.
4. Blocks sophisticated network-based cyber-attacks originating from both inside and from outside of protected facilities. This even includes sustained attacks from the inside conducted by knowledgeable personnel armed with full administrative access to everything. No signature updates are utilized for this capability (our device does not use pattern matching technology).
5. Our technology solution cannot be targeted, subverted, negated or bypassed by hackers, no matter how skilled they may be. This is because our device operates in what may be thought of as an “offline” mode in which the device is not plugged into the network, has no IP address and is not addressable. Instead, our innovation runs off a core switch span port (or hardware tap) receiving trunked data.
6. Our intended end customer market are industrial process control facilities which fear Advanced Persistent Threat malware such as the Stuxnet and Flame nation-state military attack worms, yet which cannot (or will not) make meaningful or further improvements to their cyber security.
7. Yet our device does all this with zero interaction and zero impact –none whatsoever of any kind— to the existing network infrastructure, applications or technology.
How Our Constant Guardian® Technology Works
Our Constant Guardian® technology isn’t a mere improvement of any existing cyber security technology, nor is it even loosely based on same. Rather, Constant Guardian® is a completely new type or category of cyber security defense. It uses a new and
vastly different operating principal type than has any cyber defense that has ever existed in the industry before… a defense
method that all existing professionals across the industry we have talked with so far readily admit has not even been thought of
before, never mind actually used.
Specifically, every existing cyber security defense product, device, tool and method that has existed from the dawn of the
computing age until the current day which seeks to discover or identify in-progress hacker attacks has used one or more of just
three categories of cyber security defense types or (methods) to do so: These three existing method types are:
1. Detection of Aberrant Signatures
2. Detection of Aberrant Commands
3. Detection of Aberrant Behavior
With the imminent arrival of Constant Guardian® on the market, this breakthrough technology adds a previously unknown and
unthought of new fourth method to the existing arsenal of cyber security defense methods:
4. Detection of Aberrant Command-and-Control Logic States
Constant Guardian® works by matching observed logic state changes against expected logic state changes. Using this patented new method, aberrant behavior of all types can be reliably indirectly detected by extrapolation with an extremely high level of assurance, irrespective of cause or source or type of the attack. Because this new detection method does not rely on detecting hacker or malware attacks directly, but instead only on their end results, it becomes exceptionally different for hackers to even devise conceptual ways to avoid detection by Constant Guardian® technology, never mind devise a practical evasion tactic that successfully works.
Constant Guardian® Enterprise IT Network Edition
In addition to all of the features listed above, the Enterprise IT edition of our Constant Guardian® under development now has the following additional benefits:
1. Works with encrypted and proprietary network communication protocols, or network traffic that is encapsulated within a Virtual Private Network (VPN), without needing a private key or a decoder.
2. Scales to handle large-scale enterprise IT networks consisting of hundreds of thousands or millions of servers, computers, network infrastructure devices, databases and software applications.
3. Can be optionally configured treat multiple separate enterprise networks as a single distributed domain. This is useful for strategic corporate partnership arrangements or acquisitions.