• Latest News

    News:   Security Collaboration  (16 Nov 2011)

    Ron Kelson, CEO of Synaptic Laboratories which is co-founder of the ICT Gozo Malta Project, Harry Braithwaite CEO of RACE Integrated Systems and Bob Quick CEO of BlueLight Global Solutions have today announced a new collaboration targeting the promotion of next generation cyber security solutions for critical infrastructures and especially government security and policing.   Under this Agreement BlueLight Global Solutions will act to promote Synaptic Labs to key targets in the intelligence community in the UK.

    BlueLight Global Solutions specialises in ‘Intelligent Solutions for Policing, Justice and National Security’ and its directors have occupied some of the most senior posts in UK policing including Commissioner of Police at New Scotland Yard, London; Director General of the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, and Assistant Commissioner Specialist Operations at New Scotland Yard with national responsibility for UK counter terrorism.

    News:  SEMINAR  (23 Nov 2011)

    Synaptic Labs and the ICT GM Project arrange the first Malta International Cyber Awareness Seminar with international world class participation from USA, UK, France and Brasil.   The event included bi-directional participation in the Annual Brasil Security Leaders Congress.   Streaming videos available free online now.

  • Who is Synaptic Labs

    Synaptic Laboratories Limited

    • A Private Technology Company managed by Australian citizens with Directors in Gozo, Malta (Europe) and Australia
    • Operating internationally on a ‘virtual’ basis with ten years of completed cross domain research and design
    • Core business:  cutting edge cybersecurity solutions that address critical needs and open “hard problems” identified by the USA and other Governments (2005-2011)
    - needs and problems that they say must be solved to enable the trustworthy and dependable systems they now envision and call for

    Mature solutions that are at their right time
    • perfectly coinciding with Government and corporate calls for these types of new solutions
    • satisfying their identified needs and requirements
    • proposals now advancing in the USA Federal cyber security initiatives

    Opportunities to get involved in a new (Oct 2010) virtual Cluster of Excellence!
    •

    Synaptic Labs and the Gozo Business Chamber (EU) have co-founded the ICT Gozo Malta cluster.  This CoE will work in close collaboration with key Government and private stakeholders and leading International companies to develop our innovative projects.

  • Why Cybersecurity

    Why Cybersecurity?

    Cybersecurity is the most pressing problem of the 21st Century.  U.S. President Obama's Cyberspace Security Policy Review states that our entire modern way of life is vulnerable and at risk, because cyber space touches everyone and everything, undergirding every aspect of modern life, and because cyber space and the U.S. national ICT infrastructure is NOT secure or resilient.  Therefore no nation, corporation or individual is safe.

    United Nations: "The next world war could take place in cyberspace and this needs to be avoided."

    NATO: Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen — cyber security among the top three priorities

    FBI: Cyber crime approaching annual global "turnover" of USD 1000 billion

    US White House: President Obama:  "From now on, our digital infrastructure ... will be treated as a strategic national asset ... we will develop a new comprehensive strategy to secure America's information and communications networks."

    Government of Great Britain: "Just as in the nineteenth century we had to secure the seas for our national safety and prosperity ... in the twenty first century we also have to secure our position in cyber space"

  • Why Synaptic Solutions

    Why Synaptic Solutions?

    10 years of completed research and design that anticipated today's needs places Synaptic Labs far ahead of the curve
.  Because we address cyber security objectives clearly identified by major institutions including NATO and the US Government.

    •   cross domain global and federated software designs
    •   addressing a broad range of identified problems
    •   no known competitor in targeted domains
    •   very low barriers to market entry

    Enable a new era in cyber security  through trustworthy and dependable computing systems that comprehensively protect against insider and outsider attacks, using models that encourages traditional adversaries and competitors to collaborate to ensure GREATER security for the interconnected and interdependent global community.

    

Protect and enhance EXISTING globally deployed security standards that must protect investments worth tens of billions and transactions worth trillions.

    Large Market Reach/Deployment Potential: Synaptic Labs' global-scale software solutions are universal and can accommodate billions of users
.

  • How Do We Know

    How Do We Know?

    • 2008/2009 the USA made 3 international calls for new cybersecurity solutions
    • Synaptic Labs' proposals were selected from hundreds of submissions
    • Attended the ‘by invitation only’ 2009 US National Cybersecurity Summit
    • 6 Synaptic Labs' proposals were taken up in the Summit Report  —  no known competitor

    Synaptic Labs' Offers the World's First Computing Platform that can maintain Integrity, Availability and Confidentiality against Insider and Outsider attacks:

    • Independently reviewed by former US NIST + former US NSA information security experts

    Synaptic Labs' Offers the Only New Global-scale IdM/CKM Solution Showcased at:

    • the peer reviewed US Oakridge National Laboratory Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Workshop April 2010
    • the IEEE Key Management Summit Nevada USA May 2010

    Submitted into DHS Cyber Security solicitation

    Synaptic Labs' Secure Computing, Identity Management and Cryptographic Key Management Proposals have been submitted into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cyber Security Research and Development funding call BAA 11-02 (2011)

  • Projects Roadmap

    Projects Road Map

    Synaptic Laboratories and the Gozo Business Chamber (EU) have co-founded the ICT Gozo Malta cluster of excellence. This CoE will work in close collaboration with key Government and private stakeholders and leading International companies to develop Synaptic Labs' innovative project proposals (link to our Technology Development Roadmap diagram):

    • Trustworthy Resilient Universal Secure Infrastructure platform (link)
    (with security against insider and outsider attacks)
    - TruSIP for public and private clouds (link)
    - TruSIP for smart grids/industrial control systems (link)
    - TruSIP for card transaction platforms (link)
    • Global-scale Cyber Security (link)
    (Identity Management and Cryptographic Key Management)
    - Exoskeletons to enhance existing Internet Security: VPN, VoIP, email, SSL, SSH (link)
    - Trustworthy Bank Key Ceremony Platform (link)
    - Access control for Galileo Satellite Navigation (link)
    - Quantum Key Distribution support for IdM+CKM (link)
    • Future Internet (link)
    (Janelda Universal Network Carrier Project)

  • Problems Addressed

    Addresses Critical 'Hard Cybersecurity Problems' Identified by USA NIST and DHS

    Synaptic Labs' range of secure computing, identity and key management product proposals synergistically address several of the "hardest problems in Information Security" identified by the US Department of Homeland Security and other agencies, including:

    1. continuity - the need to protect current computing and security systems in production use today from known security problems without requiring a rip-and-replace scenario
    2. survivability and availability - employing redundancy, 'separation of powers' and 'checks and balances' to guarantee the availability and security of services to clients in the face of imperfect parts that are subject to partial failures and malicious attacks
    3. combating insider threats and system wide single point of potential catastrophic failure - while maintaining confidentiality, integrity and availability.
    4. combating impact of malware - originally hidden in or downloaded on to hardware devices and operating systems (backdoors, kill switches, viruses, botnet, spyware)
    5. usable security - enabling simplified ubiquitous encryption through globally managed identifiers, such as email address (to combat intellectual property and identity theft)
    6. situational awareness - Our proposal enables push/pull based event notification and can recall earlier transactions/behavior to improve service efficiency and security
    7. removing the threat of large quantum computers - over 1 billion applications at risk
27 January 2012
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SYNAPTIC LABS IN USA FEDERAL CYBERSECURITY INITIATIVES
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White House Executive Office of the President: Synaptic Labs is invited to participate in the USA Federal cybersecurity initiatives that followed from the USA President's Cyberspace Policy Review. Synaptic offered six game changing proposals including a global identity management (IdM) and cryptographic key management (CKM) proposal specifically responding to the President's call for a new "cybersecurity based identity based vision". Read more...

Department of Homeland Security: Synaptic Labs' global IdM/CKM proposal answers the DHS call to find solutions to identified "Current Hard Problems in INFOSEC Research" in the areas of Global-Scale Identity Management, and scalable security designs that combat insider threats. Read more...

Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD): Synaptic Labs submitted three proposals to the NITRD's three international calls for leap-ahead cybersecurity proposals that resulted in Synaptic Labs participation in the NITRD "by invitation only" 2009 Summit. At that summit, Synaptic Labs submits six proposals, including proposals on global IdM/CKM and next generation Internet designs, which are taken forward in the NITRD 2009 "National Cyber Leap Year Summit". Read more... Synaptic Labs responds to the next phase of the NITRD 2010 call for input via their Cybersecurity Forum with 8 postings that outline various Synaptic Labs technologies in the context of the NITRD objectives. Offsite link to postings...

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research Workshop 2010 (CSIIRW-6): Following on from our proposals put forward at the NITRD summit, Synaptic Labs presented two peer reviewed related proposals, the first on global identity management and the second one, co-authored and co-presented with Owen McCusker of the US defence contractor Sonalysts, on combining identity with behavioural analysis. Read more...

IEEE Key Management Summit (IEEE KMS 2010): Synaptic Labs' global IdM/CKM proposal is presented to, and well received by, a specialist key management audience. It is the only proposal at the Summit to address Global-scale cryptographic key management and propose new solutions to currently open hard problems in the field. Read more...

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST): Synaptic Labs' global IdM/CKM proposal perfectly matches unmet needs identified by participants and senior NIST staff in the NIST CKM Project Workshop (2009). Read more...

USA National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA): Synaptic Labs submits 6 inputs that are accepted into the U.S. Department of Commerce NTIA call for public comment on "Information Privacy and Innovation in the Internet Economy" (2010). Synaptic Labs submits a 16 page comment into "Cybersecurity, Innovation and the Internet Economy" (2010)"  which was accepted and published by NIST.  In December 2010, Synaptic Labs was invited to comment on the Department of Commerce, Privacy Green Paper. Synaptic Labs submits a 20 page comment which was accepted and published by NTIA.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity Research & Development (CSR&D) Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) 11-02: Synaptic Labs and collaborators submit project proposals/white paper bids for contracts to fund development of Synaptic Labs' secure computing, identity and key management technologies in the joint US, UK and Australian Government supported US Department of Homeland Security Broad Agency Announcement BAA 11-02 (March 2011).

Synaptic Labs' Technology Development Roadmap

SYNAPTIC LABS IN EUROPEAN CYBERSECURITY INITIATIVES
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Malta (August 2011): We are pleased to announce that the launch of the ICT Gozo Malta Project, co-founded by Synaptic Labs, was a complete success.  Videos of the speeches made by Malta Government Ministers, Synaptic Labs CEO and others are now available online.  The Project is securing extensive ongoing press coverage including online media and full page articles in Malta’s major newspapers.

Government of Malta: funding provided (2011), through the Eco-Gozo initiative, to launch Phase 1 of the ICT Gozo Malta Project founded by Synaptic Labs and the Gozo Business Chamber.  Read more...

NATO: NATO's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen recently named cybersecurity among the top three priorities. Synaptic Labs' solutions have been promoted into NATO. Read more...

European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA): Synaptic Labs participates in the ENISA call for input. Read more...

FP7 THINK-TRUST: Synaptic Labs participates in the EU THINK-TRUST call for input. Read more...

CARTES & Identification, Paris: Synaptic Labs' CTO is guest presenter on long term security at largest annual global smart card congress for 3 consecutive years.  Read more...

European Network of Excellence for Cryptology (ECRYPT): Synaptic Labs participated in the stream cipher competition and was a loud advocate for long-term high assurance security. Synaptic Labs' cipher submission...

More information

UK Government: In June 2009 the United Kingdom Government announced it's cybersecurity strategy.

United Nations: ITU Secretary General Dr. Hamdoun Toure reports that the next world war could happen in cyberspace. Read more...

South Korea: 3000 cyber police are employed.

INCO-TRUST:  Promotes collaboration and partnerships between researchers from the developed countries such as the EU and USA in the areas of ICT Trust, Security and Dependability.

Hot technologies

Universal Key Exchange

The world's first (and only) Global-scale identifier based encryption proposal for the Internet. Manage credentials and negotiate key material internationally using public identifiers such as email addresses. Read more...

Group Key Exchange

Synaptic Lab's group key exchange is the preferred method for securely negotiating initial symmetric key material in cyptosystems. Provides enhanced protection against insider attacks. Read more...

  • “Briefly and simply, assurance work makes a user or a creditor more confident that the system works as intended without flaws, without surprises, even in the presence of malice.” … “The major shortfall is absence of assurance or safety mechanisms in software.  If my car crashed as often as my computer does, I’d be dead by now.”

    Brian Snow, Former Technical Director of the US National Security Agency (NSA), "We need Assurance", AusCERT 2008

    Read more...

  • “a significant breakthrough in quantum computation would spell doom for all these systems (ECC-192 or RSA-2048).”

    European Network of Excellence for Cryptography, "D.AZTEC.2 Alternatives to RSA", July 2005

    Read more...

  • "Some physicists predicted that within the next 10 to 20 years quantum computers will be built that are sufficiently powerful to implement Shor’s ideas and to break all existing public key schemes. Thus we need to look ahead to a future of quantum computers, and we need to prepare the cryptographic world for that future.”

    Prof Seth Lloyd of MIT, MIT Review 2008

    Read more...

First 128-bit quantum computer sold to Lockheed Martin

On the 12th of May 2011, the prestigious science Journal "Nature" published an article by D-Wave Systems which shows that D-Wave Systems' 128-bit chip is a quantum computer.   "This is the first time that the D-Wave system has been shown to exhibit quantum mechanical behaviour," says William Oliver of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the research.  This is a significant advance over the previous best results of 12 bits (2006) and 14 bits (2011).

On the 25th of May 2011 it was publicly announced that Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE: LMT) purchased a quantum computing system from D-Wave Systems Inc.  Lockheed Martin and D-Wave will collaborate to apply that computer to some of Lockheed Martin's most challenging computation problems.

In the future, it is expected that the emergence of larger quantum computers (capable of running derivatives of Shor's or Grover's quantum algorithms) will catastrophically break the vast majority of security systems used on the Internet today, exposing all encrypted data processed by those systems.  All information security systems that use RSA, D&H, Elliptic Curve Cryptography of any key size and AES-128 are at risk of complete failure.

Synaptic Laboratories has consulted extensively with quantum computing experts (such as D-Wave) and many information security experts to ensure all Synaptic Laboratories proposals use techniques that will remain secure against the known and anticipated quantum computing attacks.   Synaptic Labs' Assure range of proposals are explicitly designed to address this threat by wrapping-around and protecting the existing security infrastructure, without requiring changes to current protocols or software.

STREAMING VIDEOS
( NITRD, IEEE KMS 2010 )

A series of 5 comprehensive high-definition videos introducing Synaptic Labs, our cybersecurity proposals, and how we address USA and EU Cybersecurity needs are online now. Videos range from ~20 minutes to an hour in length.

Click here to watch the videos now.

Synaptic Labs' Global IdM/CKM Proposal


• Synaptic Laboratories Limited global cybersecurity model has been presented and published by the:
- USA NITRD National Cyber Leap Year Summit Participants Ideas Report 2009
- World Smartcard and Electronic Identity Congress CARTES, Paris FRANCE 2009
- USA Oak Ridge National Laboratory 2010 Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research Workshop (CSIIRW)
- USA IEEE Key Management Summit 2010
• Synaptic Labs offered the only new global IdM/CKM cybersecurity model at the above events:
- No known competitor
• The Synaptic Labs model offers an immediate COMBINED solution to urgent and current hard problems identified in 2009 by:
- USA Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program (NITRD)
- USA National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST)
- USA Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
• Specifically the Synaptic Labs global cybersecurity model:
- satisfies the Nov. 2009 DHS call for a new global-scale identity management (IdM) solution
- satisfies the Nov. 2009 DHS call for security systems that battle both insider and outsider attacks
- satisfies many requirements for a new global cryptographic key management (CKM) solution identified by participants (including senior NIST staff) at the June 2009 NIST CKM Workshop
- satisfies the NITRD 2009 Summit call for simplified key management to enable ubiquitous take up of encryption to combat cyber crime
- exploits layered trust models that combine object identity with behavioural analysis - as presented at the 2010 Oak Ridge National Laboratory CSIIRW
- is suitable for both symmetric and public key security systems

Key Features


• Exploits existing, commercial off the shelf hardware, in the form of low-cost smart cards, hardware security modules and smart card programmers
• Wraps around and protects the output of existing (FIPS 140-2 approved) software and hardware security installations without modifying protocols or breaking interoperability
• Relies on the strength of conventional NIST approved security primitives, such as AES-256 and SHA-512
• Combats insider attacks by using techniques pioneered by cryptographic giants Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman, Leslie Lamport
• Combats malware threats embedded within software and hardware
• Designed to scale to billions of users in a international/ global system that empowers organisations to take full control of their own security needs while supporting collaboration between traditional competitors or adversaries

 

Independent Evaluations

  • The Synaptic (Enterprise/Universal) key exchange is a very attractive and very interesting proposal to resolve a major global problem. We are unaware of any symmetric key designs proposing to be suitable to replace public key cryptography in this way. We consider the design to be inspirational and really exciting. The Synaptic design relies on well studied cryptographic techniques and block ciphers and hash functions that are international standards and that are already accepted to offer post quantum security.

    – Professors Jacques PATARIN and Louis GOUBIN.  Jacques and Louis are Professors in, and Jacques is Head of, the Cryptography Department in the PRiSM Research Laboratory, University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (YUV) in France.  Both Jacques and Louis are expert security consultants to global corporations and are published inventors of several next-generation public key algorithms intended to be secure against quantum computer attacks. Therefore they were uniquely qualified to make the initial independent assessment of the Synaptic Labs model.

Synaptic Laboratories Website Executive Summary

One of President Barack Obama’s first acts on becoming President was to order a comprehensive review of cyber security in the USA.  When presenting the subsequent report, the President's public statement on the universal nature of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems and future requirements can be summarised as follows:

ICT is the critical enabler of our modern standard of living and way of life (used in virtually everything). Existing ICT systems do not offer the security and dependability that matches their essential nature.  Consequently, our entire modern way of life is at risk. It is essential that ICT systems evolve to offer similar levels of assurance as found today in coal mines and aerospace.

Since the Report was published, the essential requirements for future ICT systems have been studied and the hard open problems published in major Government initiatives in the USA, Europe and elsewhere.

Synaptic Laboratories Limited has been an active participant in several of these major initiatives, including participation at the ‘by invitation only’ USA National Cyber Security Summit (NITRD NCLY) that followed the USA President’s cyber review.  Synaptic Labs designs universal ICT platforms and models that resolve many of the critical hard open security problems that exist across today's ICT systems, including in computing platforms, identity management, and much more.

To provide one example, Synaptic Labs (public and private) cloud computing model (TruSIP) offers advanced security controls against covert storage / timing channel attacks, and a wide range of side-channel attacks mounted by both outsiders and privileged insiders.  Insiders explicitly include the cloud provider's technical and managerial staff, as well as all insiders involved in design, implementation and maintenance of the components used in that cloud deployment.  As of 2011, our proposal is over 10+ million times faster than our nearest competitor, IBM's Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE).  The U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency will invest USD 20 million research over 5 years with the goal of reducing the performance of FHE from 10+ million times slower down to 100 thousand times slower than unencrypted computation.  By way of comparison, TruSIP's commercially relevant performance is estimated at only 2.5x - 3.5x slower than unencrypted computation.
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