Pied Piper vs CryptoMove — who wins?
[Update: after years of R&D on the world’s first moving target defense data protection platform with federal agencies and Fortune 100 R&D labs, we are productizing & commercializing CryptoMove’s moving target data protection platform as Tholos Key Vault, a product for managing keys and secrets. You can check out our private beta here.]
Among the biggest challenges facing CIOs and CISOs today is an oversupply of startups. Seed funding markets have exploded and entrepreneurship is glamorized by popular culture. This may be great for getting new ideas off the ground, but a headache for Fortune 500 execs searching for which innovative technologies to bet on. In the market for decentralized storage and data protection, for instance, it is hard to tell apart new startups like Pied Piper and CryptoMove, both of whom claim to transform data storage and protection. We’ve put this post together to help cut through the noise.
“What if we use all those phones to build a massive network? We use my compression algorithm to make everything small, efficient, move things around. And if we could do it, we could build a completely decentralized version of our current internet…”
— Richard Hendrix, CEO, Pied Piper
Enterprise ready? Winner: CryptoMove
Both Pied Piper (in its current iteration) and CryptoMove target the enterprise market. (Although the idea of decentralized storage for the masses sounds great in theory, in reality consumers don’t have the same massive amounts of data requirements & don’t take security as seriously as Fortune 500 companies.) Pied Piper’s first customer is an insurance company. CryptoMove, meanwhile, is working with early adopter paying customers in the Fortune 500 as well as federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security.
The fundamental difference between CryptoMove and Pied Piper’s approach is that CryptoMove decentralizes existing enterprise infrastructure, while Pied Piper attempts to scatter its customer’s enterprise data across hundreds of thousands of consumer phones at Hoolicon.
Decentralized storage vs. Decentralized moving target data protection? Winner: CryptoMove
Pied Piper’s vision is to spread data out, but Pied Piper lacks CryptoMove’s key patent pending innovation — moving target data protection. Fragmenting and spreading out data is table stakes. Distributed and even decentralized data is still a stationary target at rest. Against Pied Piper’s storage system, attackers can easily work through the Lockheed killchain and perform reconnaissance on fragmented ciphertext, move laterally through storage infrastructure, and exfiltrate data and keys.
Moving target data protection fundamentally changes the game. With continuous — and dynamic — movement, mutation, and re-encryption, CryptoMove constantly changes data properties and locations, making it a nightmare for adversaries. Even if data is exfiltrated, it doesn’t add up. Furthermore, only CryptoMove’s datastore is resilient and self-healing. By creating replicated data fragments and dynamically moving data in high-availability clusters, CryptoMove ensures that even if data is lost, corrupted, deleted, or even attacked by ransomware, CryptoMove’s data store persists.
Comparing accelerators & backing? Winner: CryptoMove
Pied Piper is nothing if not scrappy, hailing from Erlich Bachman’s “Hacker Hostel.” CryptoMove, on the other hand, got its start for the first 4 years of bootstrapped, stealth R&D, in our CTO’s home office.
Once CryptoMove’s prototype was ready, we “incubated” the technology and turned it into a company at the Alchemist Accelerator — rated #1 for follow-on funding and focusing exclusively on enterprise startups. At Alchemist Accelerator, CryptoMove received mentorship from industry leading founders and CEOs of IPO’d enterprise software companies as well as veteran executive coaches and advisors from companies like Cisco, Juniper, AWS, Google, and others. We also raised our seed funding round, led by Tim and Billy Draper’s Draper Associates fund as well as founders, execs, and early investors from Palantir, FireEye, Palo Alto Networks, Facebook, and others — well before demo day. After Alchemist, CryptoMove has participated in Plug and Play’s technology ecosystem, where we’ve met CEOs, CISOs, CTOs, and CIOs from dozens of Fortune 500 companies interested in transforming their approach to data protection away from an easy stationary target at rest to moving target defense.
Not to disparage a competitor, but perhaps if Pied Piper had slightly “smarter” money and better advisors, they’d avoid some of their early travails.
Comparing pivots? Winner: CryptoMove
Pied Piper has had 4 seasons of iterations and pivots, and counting. Starting out as a compression algorithm, moving to video chat, and now “decentralized storage.” Whatever works, right?
CryptoMove too started out as something else. Initially, before inventing moving target data protection, CryptoMove worked on a new distributed programming language — Hello. CryptoMove is Hello’s first killer application, leveraging highly concurrent distributed programming concepts for decentralized and moving target data protection.
Comparing algorithms? Slam dunk winner: CryptoMove
Pied Piper burst onto the scene with CEO Richard Hendricks’ groundbreaking new middle-out compression algorithm. “Even if your file is already compressed, we can make it smaller” — claims the Pied Piper website.
CryptoMove — importantly — has zero new proprietary algorithms for encryption, compression, or fragmentation. Instead, CryptoMove is algorithm agnostic. Agnostic to the encryption algorithm (AES-256, homomorphic, post-quantum). Agnostic to the fragmentation algorithm (secret sharing, erasure coding). And, yes, agnostic to the compression algorithm. Meaning, if a customer wants, we can even use Pied Piper’s. CryptoMove is a datastore that is peer to peer, decentralized, and where data is continuously and dynamically protected with movement and mutation. Everything about CryptoMove is swappable and customizable.
After a year of designing our product with the industry’s leading Fortune 500 CISOs and security experts, it became abundantly clear that betting on a proprietary algorithm (especially in the world of encryption, where the only constant is that algorithms change) was a losing bet. In fact, CryptoMove is not an encryption company. We are a datastore. Unlike Pied Piper and other data protection tools of today, CryptoMove will not need to be ripped out every time a new breakthrough or algorithm deprecation occurs. Instead, CryptoMove is a future-proof and flexible datastore and data protection technology.
Sorry Pied Piper, maybe next season.
