GuardWare has launched the encryption software suite Protect, that will allegedly protect sensitive data while in use. The software has allowed data to flow securely up and down the supply chain and be destroyed by the document owner at any time as needed.
“We are in an ‘Asymmetric Threatscape’ environment where hackers don’t need to break in — they simply log in,” CEO & co-founder of GuardWare, Rizwan Mahmood, said.
Protect is the outcome of a collaborative project between GuardWare and UNSW researchers, supported by funding from Defence Trailblazer to uplift cyber resilience by protecting data itself.
The intellectual property (IP) at the heart of operations in the defence industry is often stored in unstructured data files, which include engineering or Computer Aided Design (CAD) files, sensor data, source code, office files, project management files and videos.
In practice, much of this sensitive material remains unencrypted and unprotected — often sitting on a designer’s desktop. This puts them at serious risk of data theft when the login credentials of “trusted users” are compromised. The risks are increasing as AI-based phishing become more sophisticated and easier for unskilled threat actors to use against large and small organisations.
Until now, there has been no way to encrypt unstructured data at the individual file level while in use. Protection of sensitive data currently relies on best intent, blind trust, audit report KPIs and contract penalties. This leaves data vulnerable to hostile actors.
Defence Trailblazer’s Technology Development & Acceleration (TDA) program provided funding and academic expertise from Professor Salil Kanhere and Dr Sushmita Ruj from UNSW Sydney for the unstructured data resilience project, which has culminated in the development of the PROTECT software suite.
“A key focus was ensuring that persistent encryption can operate at scale without introducing noticeable delays in file access, editing, or transfer. By addressing computational overheads early, we aimed to deliver a solution that provides strong security guarantees while remaining seamless and practical for end users," Kanhere stated.
GuardWare’s Protect is an encryption software suite based on Data-Centric Security (DCS) technology. It has been designed to protect official sensitive data across the whole Defence supply chain.
The software suite will support persistent file encryption in-use, meaning that files remain encrypted during editing, not just at rest or in transit.