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Security Researchers Want to Hide Your Data in 'cyberfog'


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cyberfog, illustration

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Computer scientists at the U.S. Army Laboratory see "cyberfog" as a powerful new form of data security. They say partially compromised data on a fog network would remain useful to users and opaque to adversaries.

Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Cisco, ARM, and Princeton University formed the OpenFog Consortium last year to promote the architectural idea. In fog computing, data is fragmented and partly maintained within a network that is local to end-user devices, whether it is an industrial control system or an iPad, instead of in centralized cloud locations. The security architecture is enabled by ad-hoc peer-to-peer networks, mesh networks, and self-healing networks. Hackers would only see shards of information spread across multiple devices, and would not be able to determine what it means. Intentional deception and obfuscation further compound the uncertainty for adversaries.

Fogging will not be easy to implement, considering it "must take into account the size, density, complexity, and tempo of the network, the mobility and geographic proximity of users and nodes where data shards are stored, how soon sharded information will become stale, how soon stored information might be needed, and so on," the researchers say.

From Motherboard
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Abstracts Copyright © 2016 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA


 

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