Researchers Release Security Software To Defend Against Cyberattacks

With every text message sent, every email, every item purchased online, consumers blindly rely on the process of encryption, the scrambling of data that protects it from unwanted eyes. But encryption is hard to get right. "Right now, encryption's ability to protect our data is only as strong as the testing its endured," said CyLab's Bryan Parno, an associate professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering. "If the encryption implementation has a bug, then a clever adversary can see credit card information, bank details, emails - whatever you might consider private." For years, researchers have been working towards a holy grail of cybersecurity: developing code that is verifiably secure and hence requiring no penetration testing. This verifiably secure code would be mathematically proven to be invincible against certain types of cyberattacks. A team consisting of researchers from Microsoft Research , Inria and CyLab (Parno and his Ph.D. student Aymeric Fromherz) recently released the world's first verifiably secure industrial-strength cryptographic library - a set of code that can be used to protect data and is guaranteed to protect against the most popular classes of cyberattacks.