The colossal rise in the popularity of digital assets has resulted in an increased demand for solutions pertaining to their security, privacy, and compliance. Of a truth, the digital asset space is still quite novel in nature, which could potentially suffer from stifled growth without a supporting ecosystem.
Enter Unbound, a leading agent of change in the nascent digital assets industry which is determined to provide the right types of security and compliance solutions to the existing market players. Unbound not only takes revolutionary mathematical breakthroughs as its Pole Star but also makes sure that these complex mathematical and cryptographic solutions are effortlessly translated into the real-world application to ensure that business secrets never run the risk of being exposed.
The organization has already enabled a number of business concerns to get their footing in the new world of digital assets with its highly scalable and efficient solution offerings. Unbound’s business DNA stems from its co-founders and world-renowned cryptographers, Professor Yehuda Lindell, and Professor Nigel Smart.
The company makes use of Multi-Party Computation (MPC), a subset of cryptography which requires validation from multiple parties in order to access private data. With the thoughtful implementation of MPC-based solutions, Unbound is determined to enable organizations to perform analytics on shared data sources while also safeguarding the privacy of each contributor.
Blockchain Reporter recently got the opportunity to interview Mr. Oz Mishli, Vice President, Products at Unbound Tech, to know more about this disruptive phenomenon.
BR: How did the team at Unbound manage to translate the academic theory of crypto-security into a real-world application?
Mishli: Cryptographers first developed Multi-Party Computation in the 1980s as a way to allow mutually distrustful parties to perform a joint computation on their individual inputs without having to reveal their data to one another. Since approximately the 2000s, MPC protocols have become efficient enough to use in real-life settings. Unbound is a result of our co-founders’, Professor Yehuda Lindell and Professor Nigel Smart sophisticated applications of MPC to transform a once only academic theory into practical reality.
BR: What separates Unbound from its competition? Could you explain the “No single machine or entity is ever trusted with your sensitive secrets” narrative?
Mishli: The technology foundation of the company’s offering leverages MPC to enable a new model of trust built on multiple entities rather than entrusting key protection to a single machine. Keys are split into random shards placed on separate, highly segregated machines and never exist in complete form throughout the key lifecycle – not even when generated or while in use. It is guaranteed mathematically that unless all machines are breached simultaneously, the keys cannot be compromised.
BR: What are some of the most prominent use-cases for Unbound?
Mishli: Unbound offers a broad range of solutions covering cryptographic key management, secure identity and authentication (for humans and machines) and can be used on any cloud, server or endpoint. Following are some examples of supported use cases:
Virtual HSM – delivering the security and functionality of a traditional hardware security module (HSM) in a pure-software implementation, allowing enterprises to eliminate their existing reliance on hardware appliances and adopt an agile, automated software-defined cryptography approach
Control Your Own Key (CYOK) – a method of protecting cryptographic keys in the cloud that gives enterprises full control, splitting keys between the cloud service provider and an enterprise-controlled server so they can be used in the cloud without the keys ever existing there
Blockchain and cryptocurrency key management – ensuring that the private keys representing crypto-assets and transactions are protected from compromise and misuse by attackers, and enabling advanced cryptography-based quorum authorization mechanisms for transactions
BR: What is Crypto-of-Things in layman terms?
Mishli: Unbound Crypto-of-Things (CoT) ensures that your apps are secure regardless of the security posture of the device on which they’re deployed. A unified, single API is used to deploy a virtual root of trust that protects cryptographic keys at the application level, ensuring they cannot be compromised, cloned or tampered even if the device is infected by malware or controlled by an adversary.
CoT can be deployed on any endpoint device and platforms; from IoT and mobile to laptops and even application servers and containers in the cloud or data center to enable high trust operations like document signing, payments, blockchain transactions and authentication from any endpoint device. For example, see how you can use CoT to sign digital transactions on mobile applications.
BR: Can you tell us about Unbound’s partnerships with banks and tech companies?
Mishli: A number of Fortune 500 enterprises with the strictest security and privacy requirements deploy Unbound’s products, including several banks and financial services companies. Our main investors are Goldman Sachs and Citi which see Unbound as providing an undeniable necessity as part of an organization’s security infrastructure.
In addition, we have partnered and integrated our products with multiple well-known technology companies including CyberArk and Google among others. Learn more by checking out our Partner’s Page.
