Cloud Security Alliance hackathon offers $10,000 prize
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) will hold its fourth hackathon at the RSA Conference 2016 in San Francisco, to continue to test the CSA Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) Specification V.1. A top prize of $10,000 is available to the first participant to either access or disrupt a cloud-based mission critical application.
The SDP research project is a collaboration among more than 100 companies and U.S. government agencies and organizations. Companies such as Coca-Cola, Verizon, Mazda Motor Corp. and other CSA members are contributing to a new standard for perimeter security. This approach is necessary because traditional enterprise security is being compromised by non-secured mobile devices, cloud services and outsourcing.
The challenge
In the previous three SDP hackathons, the focus was on security. In the fourth SDP hackathon, the focus is on enabling mission critical cloud deployment.
Currently enterprises prefer to deploy mission critical applications in traditional data centers. This SDP hackathon takes on the challenge of creating a highly robust infrastructure by replicating an application across multiple public clouds.
Conceptually this hackathon is researching the concept of creating a disruption-tolerant application environment by combining the resources of multiple public clouds.
In a major development, Verizon will lend infrastructure and expertise to enable the SDP hackathon to reflect the actual architecture used to serve government and business clients. More importantly, Verizon will monitor the public cloud infrastructure to see how well the SDP is able to provide 100 percent uptime by combing the resources of multiple public clouds.
“It’s great to see Verizon actively engaged in the development and testing of SDP. The market is clearly looking for a solution that helps stop cyberattacks and the added support of Verizon will help greatly in SDP’s evolution as a comprehensive solution.” said Bob Flores, the former CTO of the CIA, and current managing partner of Cognitio Corp. and SDP Workgroup Co-Chair.
The SDP specification uses a framework of security controls that mitigates network-based attacks on Internet-accessible applications by eliminating connectivity to them until devices and users are authenticated and authorized; thereby creating dynamically provisioned perimeters for clouds, demilitarized zones, and data center infrastructures. The SDP has been designed to be highly complementary to Software Defined Networks (SDN), the popular network layer construct that decouples routing and architectural decisions from the underlying equipment to create virtual networks. SDP traverses several open system interconnection (OSI) layers to tie applications and users with trusted networks, using vetted security models.
