Awards

June 2010
SCIT Labs is the overall winner of the Global Security Challenge and CNI-Expo sponsored Security Technologies of Tomorrow Challenge. This competition for security start-ups was only open to finalists from previous GSC competitions.  “This competition brings together the best entrants from various challenges to compete against each other in a race to be crowned the Best Security Technology of Tomorrow.”

November 2009
SCIT Labs was awarded 2nd place in the 2009 GSC Cyber Security Challenge at GSC Summit held at London Business School in November 2009. GSC = Global Security Challenge.

October 2008
SCIT Labs was winner of the TIE-DC Elevator Pitch competition.

Media Reports

• Kelly Jackson Higgins, “Dark Reading News Analysis: New Intrusion Tolerance Technology Treats Attacks as Inevitable”, http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=153621 12 May 2008
• Kelly Jackson Higgins, “Dark Reading Port In A Storm: Are Security Breaches Inevitable?”, http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=154016 15 May 2008
• Jennifer Edgerly, “New Intrusion Tolerance Software Fortifies Server Security”, http://gazette.gmu.edu/articles/12128/ , 18 June 2008 (abridged version at http://www.physorg.com/news132846874.html and http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080616144905.htm )
• “La tol鲡nce aux intrusions profite de la virtualisation”, http://www.atelier.fr/securite/10/18062008/tolerance-aux-intrusions-virtualisation-36715-.html 18 June 2008
• Tim Greene, “Software makes virtual servers a moving target”, Network World, http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/061908-scit.html?page=1 , 19 June 2008 (also in http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9101418&source=rss_news50; http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/147406/limit_internet_attacks_with_virtual_servers.html)

Patents

• “Self-Cleaning System”, US 7549167. Issued 6/16/2009. Inventors: Yih Huang and Arun Sood
• “SCIT-DNS: Critical Infrastructure Protection through Secure DNS Server Dynamic Updates”, US 7680955. Issued 03/16/2010. Inventors: David Arsenault, Yih Huang and Arun Sood.
• “Single Use Server System”, US 7725531. Issued May 25, 2010 Inventors: David Arsenault, Yih Huang and Arun Sood.

Pending Patents

• Regular US Patent Application # 11,419,832, Data Alteration Prevention System, Filed 5/23/2006.
• Regular US Patent Application # 12,695,710, Self-Cleansing Secure DNS Server
• Regular US Patent Application # 12,695,686, Cache Validating SCIT DNS Server

Publications

SCIT has submitted joint proposals with: 

SCIT’s partners in systems integration, sales, and marketing are: 

                                 

Staff

Arun Sood
Dr. Sood is CEO of SCIT Labs Inc, a startup that is licensing SCIT technology from George Mason University. He has published more than 150 papers and edited two books. Three SCIT patents have been issued, and three patent applications are pending. A list of his publications and detailed resume can be found at http://cs.gmu.edu/~asood. He has a BTech (1966) from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and an MS (1967) and PhD (1971) from Carnegie Mellon University. All of his degrees are in electrical engineering. 

Arleen Zank
Arleen Malley Zank is Program Director and Solutions Architect with over 25 years of experience in technology commercialization and product development and designing, developing and delivering complex large-scale enterprise solutions.  Ms Zank has extensive experience integrating new and emerging technology to solve mission critical information infrastructure challenges and the scientific and technical challenges of integrating new technology into existing standards-based IT environments.  In particular, she has experience developing and deploying FISMA, NIST and Classified secure systems. Ms. Zank is Co-Founder and President of Coronado Group, Ltd. a specialized systems integration and technology advisory firm focused on emerging and disruptive technology, technology strategy, intellectual property, and commercialization.   Prior to founding Coronado Group, Ltd. in 1991, Ms. Zank served as a Program Director responsible for program capture and management, pricing strategies, and product development for a Fortune 200 information technology company.

Anantha Bangalore
Mr. Bangalore is Chief Systems Architect. Anantha has a proven 18-year track record of leading, managing and developing on time and quality solutions in Health Information, Security, E-Commerce and Financial domains. He has published many papers in national and international conferences.

Lee Mericle
Ms. Mericle is Chief Software Engineer.  Lee has broad experience in software design and development and in formal Government testing management. She has worked with systems ranging from large computer-based training (CBT) systems to a cellular telephone antenna system. She works on various research projects for the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications (LHNCBC) and served as Aquilent’s program manager for NLM projects.

Businesses are increasingly vulnerable to security breaches.

The current reactive systems lead to many alerts and require extensive alert (incident) management costs. Furthermore, many of the alerts are false positives, and thus an extensive amount of effort is wasted.

SCIT technology is threat independent.  It reduces the impact of zero day attacks, thus providing protection while the manufacturer develops and distributes a patch.  In this way even the small retailer is protected – there maybe undetected intrusions but the losses are contained.  Further, SCIT servers do not generate alerts and this reduces the need for alert processing.  Without SCIT, effective alert processing is essential, to avoid the long term (days, weeks and months) residency of the bad guys in the system.  For this reason, SCIT servers reduce the cost of operations.

SCIT Benefits

How does SCIT work like a vaccine?

Vaccines have been successfully used to significantly reduce the risk of certain diseases.  For example, the small pox vaccine has eliminated small pox.  Polio vaccine is another success story.  In both cases the vaccines, with requisite boosters, immunize the patient for life and are very successful.

On the other hand there are vaccines that have limited goals but are still very useful. The flu vaccine provides immunity against three specific strains and has to be applied every year.  From among the many strains, the vaccine manufacturer research estimates the three strains that will be most prevalent and develops protection against these strains. In general the flu vaccine reduces infections and speeds recovery.

Typically, vaccines are effective for a time period and often booster shots are needed.  Further, the vaccination not only protects the individual and also the community.  For example, the flu vaccine is recommended by the CDC not only to protect individuals, but also to prevent the spread of the flu (fewer people getting the flu = fewer people spreading the flu) each season.  In addition to the vaccine, everyone is encouraged to obey simple rules (wash your hands often) so as to frequently restore the system to a clean state, thus prevent spread of infection.

SCIT is a digital vaccine that removes the malware and viruses every cycle.  Like the flu, new variants of the malware continuously appear, and restoring systems to a clean state (like washing hands) reduces the chance of infection.  The cycle duration is chosen by the user – one minute cycles have been achieved. SCIT servers are protected from long presence of the malware or virus on the servers – thus making it difficult to infect other servers in the system. SCIT server damage is limited by the duration of exposure time of the server to the internet, and the automatic recovery to a pristine state is included in the SCIT server cycle. SCIT technology complements the current reactive systems like firewalls, IDS and IPS; and leads to further reduction in malicious data ex-filtration.

SCIT’s virtual servers are killed every cycle, thus forcibly breaking the connection from the server to the bad guys every cycle – maybe every minute.  This implies that the attacker has to make repeated attempts to download large files.  Repeated attempts increase the attacker exposure. By restoring the SCIT servers to a pristine state, the number of records lost per breach is reduced by several orders of magnitude.  When the SCIT technology is integrated with current reactive approaches the data ex-filtration per cycle is further reduced.

Businesses are increasingly vulnerable to security breaches.

The current reactive systems lead to many alerts and require extensive alert (incident) management costs. Furthermore, many of the alerts are false positives, and thus an extensive amount of effort is wasted.

SCIT technology is threat independent.  It reduces the impact of zero day attacks, thus providing protection while the manufacturer develops and distributes a patch.  In this way even the small retailer is protected – there maybe undetected intrusions but the losses are contained.  Further, SCIT servers do not generate alerts and this reduces the need for alert processing.  Without SCIT, effective alert processing is essential, to avoid the long term (days, weeks and months) residency of the bad guys in the system.  For this reason, SCIT servers reduce the cost of operations.

SCIT Benefits

Vaccines have been used to significantly reduce the risk of certain diseases. The small pox vaccine has eliminated small pox. The polio vaccine is another success story. Both these cases the vaccines immunize the patient for life and are very successful.

Other vaccines have limited goals but are still very useful. The flu vaccine provides immunity against three specific strains and must be applied every year. In general, the flu vaccine reduces infections and speeds recovery. In Fall 2011, there have been reports of success with the malaria vaccine. The developers, GlaxoSmithKline and the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, which receives funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said it showed roughly a 50% reduction in malaria cases in a 12 month period following vaccination. “Such a vaccine would not replace proven malaria control interventions such as insecticide-treated bed nets,” the CDC’s Hamel said, “but could be an important addition to those interventions.”

SCIT is a digital vaccine that removes the malware and viruses every cycle.  The cycle duration is chosen by the user – one minute cycles have been achieved. SCIT servers are protected from long presence of the malware or virus on the servers – thus making it difficult to infect other servers in the system. SCIT server damage is limited by the duration of exposure time of the server to the internet, and the automatic recovery to a pristine state is included in the SCIT server cycle. SCIT technology complements the current reactive systems like firewalls, IDS and IPS; and leads to further reduction in malicious data ex-filtration.

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