ICO Review — 5 reasons why Uncloak will be the next game player in cybersecurity

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Crypto ICO Review - US/FR

7 min readMay 19, 2018

Uncloak is a blockchain-based solution that aims to help businesses protect themselves and eliminate cyber threats, always staying one step ahead of hackers.

1. A sector booming but a shortage of solution

Computer hacking is a global problem that grows every year as the connectivity of individuals and devices increases (explosion of the connected objects market -IoT-, development of smart cities and mass digitization of the population). Not a day passes without us hearing about computer attacks, data leaks or new ransomware. Even though the public, Internet and telecommunications sectors are the main targets of cyberattacks (industrial espionage), piracy affects all categories of businesses ranging from small businesses to web giants. We keep in mind the impressive attack suffered by TV5Monde, which almost ended with a takeover of the broadcast by russian hackers or massive data leaks from web giants such as Linkedin, Yahoo, …

It’s difficult to estimate the losses due to the computer attacks but according to estimates of cybersecurity companies, the losses would be 13 billion dollars for worms and viruses and $ 226 billion for attacks. According to other studies, cybercrime is expected to cost $ 6 trillion a year by 2021.

In their attempts to protect against computer attacks, companies face several problems:

There is a shortage of protection solutions that are proactive in identifying new threats.
Cyber attacks are constantly evolving which makes setting up a very complicated protection policy. In addition, this requires security experts and (very) important financial resources.
Current cybersecurity solutions rely on an isolated and personalized approach to threat management, with (very) limited (or no) knowledge sharing between industry players.
Most of the patterns and signatures that help security software detect a vulnerability are available for free on the Internet, allowing hackers to have the same knowledge as a security consultant.

The consequence is an eternal game between robbers and cops where everyone tries to be one step ahead to protect themselves for the companies and to succeed attack for the hacker.

In this context, Uncloak has created a solution based on blockchain, smart contracts and Artificial Intelligence in order to allow companies to protect themselves at a lower cost while always being one step ahead of hackers.

2. A vulnerability scanner

All businesses, large and small, have similar security requirements for protecting their infrastructure. Starting from this observation and relying on its expertise, Uncloak has spent the last year creating a vulnerability scanner whose main features are:

Automatically identify a customer’s public Internet footprint (websites, mail servers, applications, and computers on the Internet) for security analysis, which significantly reduces the time required for setting up the security scan.
An easy-to-use and easy-to-understand dashboard to check the progress of scans and reports, request external IT consulting, and set up security scans.
A “Black Hat” mode that simulates a live hacking attempt against a mail server. It also checks the virus protection of a client.

This tools will evolve by including the following features:

Allow users to scan their internal network for threats and vulnerabilities and aggregate the results into a central dashboard.
Cloud environments can be analyzed with the ability to search for vulnerabilities on different types of cloud: public / private / hybrid on Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud.
An engine that will verify compliance with Cyber Essentials, PCI DSS and ISO27001 standards.
An advanced version of the “Black Hat” mode that will convert online databases into tools that will be used to check for vulnerabilities across multiple operating systems ranging from the website, workstation, and databases

3. A fully automated bug bounty

Uncloak proposes a fully automated bug bounty. As a reminder, the principle of a bug bounty is to reward users who report bugs and/or security vulnerabilities.

The Uncloak system is structured around two main roles:

The bug hunter who will be paid in UCC token to find security vulnerabilities in the system and to provide palliative solutions
The validator that will validate (or not) the security vulnerabilities listed.

Uncloak will create a community of security experts and hacker “white hat” to assume these different roles. To be part of it, there is a selection process via a KYC / AML and after, user need to apply to become a hunter and/or a validator.

The process is then very simple. When a hunter finds a new vulnerability, he submits it to the community. At first, the system will automatically check if it’s not an already listed vulnerability. If so, the hunter is notified that his vulnerability is a duplicate. In the case of it’s a new one vulnerability, a smart contract containing the information on this vulnerability is created. This smart contract allows other hunters / validators to validate (or not) the vulnerability. Four positive votes are needed to validate that the vulnerability found is genuine and can be recorded in the blockchain.

The hunter who discovered the vulnerability (validated) will be rewarded by receiving 10,000 UCC tokens and each validator will receive 1,500 UCC.

Note that each hunter has the ability to assume the role of validator by checking the vulnerability of another hunter.

This fully automated system through the use of blockchain and smart contracts significantly reduces the level of manual administration, costs and time required to announce a new threat on the Uncloak platform.

4. A threat detection engine which use AI

Uncloak works in collaboration with Krzana, a company specialized in artificial intelligence that develops software capable of reading messages on social networks, forums, website, …

This collaboration allows Uncloak to:

Monitor the “public” internet and especially the darknet where “black hat” hackers sell software or hardware vulnerabilities.
Create a search engine updated in real time through this “monitoring”.

The use of AI allows Uncloak to update its search engine with the reading of data streams from more than 7,000 sources (independent forums, chatrooms, metadata, blogs and social networks). These unstructured textual data will be ingested, transformed into structured data and made usable for the search engine. In addition to this, it allows the system to warn customers who might be at risk for a new detected vulnerability.

5. The team, the roadmap and the demo

Presently, the Uncloak team consists of 13 people with a solid experience in cybersecurity, in development (AI and Blockchain), in business and marketing. Furthermore, seven advisors are also part of the team, with half of the profiles oriented towards cybersecurity and the other half oriented towards business and strategy. It’s a good mix which promits a great solution and a good business development.

The product roadmap is quite interresting since it foresees the finalization of a final version of the Uncloak’s platform for the end of the year 2018. By then, the roadmap will be the following one:

Q2: Development of the beta version of the monitoring engine that allows real-time analysis of more than 7,000 different data sources.
Q3: Development of the alpha version of the bug bounty based on the EOS blockchain + launch of the creation of the community of security experts and hackers “white hat”
Q4: Launch of the alpha version of the bug bounty based on the EOS test blockchain, the alpha version of the monitoring engine and the Uncloak public platform

A first demo of the vulnerability scanner already exists and can be tested at this url: https://demo.uncloak.io. We discover a simple graphic interface, refined and very user friendly which facilitates a quick start. Below, some screenshots of this demo: