Submitted Abstract
This project is a pathfinder project. It is meant to investigate and assess the commercial viability of the new idea together with its competitive position in the market of an idea that we designed and nighly-build in a prototype. The project is meant to support our activity to understand the requirements coming from potential customers and those necessary for the commercialization of a possible product based on the prototype. We also intend to improve the current nightly-build prototype by improving technology that we have used; we intend also to test and benchmark it carefully in order to be able to propose to potential customers a clear and complete overview of the advantages of the product against the state of the art solutions offered by competitors.That clarified, we disclose that the new idea of this project is an anti-ransomware system.Differently from current anti-ransomware solutions, which are just a few, it does not help recover from a ransomware attack. More specifically, it does not either analyse the behaviour of applications running on a computer in the attempt to find evidence of the presence of a ransomware in the system, like many anti-viruses do, nor it stores information that can be later used to decrypt files when a ransomware has finished its job, a strategy that may fail and has been proved extremely expensive in resources and with no assurance of success.Instead, our solution stops a ransomware before it starts encrypting files. The core idea (invention disclosure #180013) relies on a cryptographic understanding of the way in which ransomware work. Our nighly-build implementation (which we needed to have to provide scientific evidence on the reliability of the idea but which, we need to be stress, is far from being a minimal valuate product) already demonstrates that we can stop 94% of the ransomware from a set of hundreds of real ransomware sample that we collected.This including the currently unstoppable NotPetya, a ransomware used for cyber attacks and currently able to circumvent any existing defense. We believe that our idea has an immense commercial potentiality and with this project, we intend to put this statement to a test. We also intend to come out with a solid plan towards a full commercialization and exploitation of the idea and to define a roadmap to be used in a successive POC proposal.