This is necessary but unfortunately every problem does not have a solution. It is creditable that the govt is trying and that contenders to be the sovereign ai are willing.
It is the first balanced article on the subject from indian mainstream media. Else the entire paper is advertising.
There is no reason why the global private players will price this in an affordable range.
Or that it will work at all.
This is the part that very few understand.
Cybersecurity is increasingly becoming an impossible to solve problem. Not difficult, but impossible. And that is because cyber attackers are using ai themselves.
Iron can cut iron.
Drones can intercept drones.
But ai cannot counter ai.
Because that is the very construct of ai in its current form.
Thus data protection has to be addressed in a world where software solutions may not work fast enough or well enough.
Data storage is no longer safe in the cloud. Doesn’t matter where in the cloud.
Data has to use the bank locker model. Bank lockers are cheaper to safeguard on a per locker basis than it is to safeguard safes located in private houses.
The task is then down to ensuring that if someone breaks into the bank locker room, they cannot open the lockers. This is where a different cybersecurity paradigm comes in.
There are very few ai companies focused on this. India has two startups which are probably global leaders in this. One is Cyber Kyro with a HyperSecure Vault which has the locker key in your phone. And the phone itself is secured with two levels of encryption. So even if someone is able to violate the first layer to get it, they will then need to crack the encryption. And if they crack that then they have to decode the next level of encryption. This is hard to do. But it also makes locker operation cumbersome for the data owner. To get around ease of operation they use ai. And from what I have seen, it seems to work.
The other startup with something real and working is Kodoy. They look upon data very differently. They mechanically put it off the internet. So you need to first electromechanically (but automatically) connect the storage medium to the cloud and then you need to decrypt the data in the cloud. To decrypt the data, you have to first move the data to a safe location and only then can it be decrypted. This approach is difficult for cyber warfare systems to break into.
So far no ethical hacker has been able to hack into any of them. But it would be great for thousands more to try. So now, an ethical hacking competition is being organised with 100 bitcoins in the vault to be looted. Looters get to keep what they loot. Of course they need to figure out the bitcoin password as well. It would be great to see where the ethical hackers get to.
But if they can’t, India would have developed a solution which is cyber safe and doesn’t need Mythos to safeguard our data. It is also a solution with a cost which is at least one order of magnitude, if not two, cheaper.
