Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with the CBDO of Binarii Labs, a pioneering private Irish company founded on September 14, 2021. Binarii Labs was established by four visionaries united by a shared passion for data security, data sovereignty, and deep tech. The founding team includes Steven Garner, the CTO and inventor, who brings senior-level experience from global financial institutions; Ciarán McNamee and Nigel Carter, both with extensive careers in investment banking; and Aidan Finn, who boasts over a decade of deep tech business expertise.
Recognizing a significant gap in existing cybersecurity measures, particularly in safeguarding core data, the founders collaborated to address these vulnerabilities. They built upon Steven Garner's innovative invention, which has now secured patents in both the UK and the US.
Binarii Labs is on a mission to revolutionize data processing, enhancing data sovereignty, privacy, security, and secure sharing. Their goal is to ensure business continuity, facilitate disaster recovery, and eliminate the inherent risks associated with using email for file sharing—a major threat vector for cyber-attacks.
Join us as we delve deeper into the vision, challenges, and future plans of Binarii Labs with their CBDO.
Could you explain in detail what your solutions entail and how they employ the principle of data fragmentation and how it is implemented?
Binarii Labs patented IP has formed the basis for us to now develop BinariiDSP as a novel and innovative platform that will enable ease of integration for any enterprise user to allow that enterprise to 100% own and control all of theirs and their stakeholder’s data in a unique and innovative way. This will provide them with an automated solution for cloud contingency, and automated back-up, through multi cloud distribution of duplicated fragments of each file that have been heavily encrypted. All of this occurs in a zero-knowledge manner as far as Binarii Labs is concerned. Binarii Labs will not hold any of the client enterprise’s data, it is merely processed by the BinariiDSP unique intervention on upload by the enterprises’ stakeholders, users, or clients. At the same time, BinariiDSP provides that enterprise and their user with a world’s first independent, immutable blockchain generated “Proof of Record.”
Overall, BinariiDSP solves multiple significant concerns facing enterprises that are even broader than data security. Cloud contingency is a growing concern for business ‘globally, but perhaps more specifically in Europe due to the progressiveness of Digital Operational Resilience and Data Privacy guidelines and in particular for the regulated Financial services sector and any of their third-party providers through the implementation of the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), which is due to be in place from 1st January 2025 and the Network and Information Security Directive (NIS2) also being implemented in 2025. Given the nature of the BinariiDSP solution design and functionality, in addition to the benefits earlier noted, fundamentally it protects organisations from ransomware demands even when a bad actor has breached the client’s storage space, hence saving its enterprise users from significant business disruption and reputational damage that come from a breach report. With BinariiDSP, no data subject is harmed or placed at risk when the breach has occurred in one of the client’s multiple cloud locations.
The proprietary process that occurs within the BinariiDSP solution when any of the enterprises’ clients files, or forms of user data are uploaded by either the enterprise client user’s permissioned staff members or their own application client users is what ultimately uniquely protects that data securely. How this novel and important process works is an intervention on upload of any file type that heavily encrypts that file, then breaks it into partial fragments and clones all encrypted fragments (some more than once). Those encrypted fragments are distributed then to three or more cloud locations owned by the client, where Binarii Labs have no access and do not hold any data. The manner in which the fragments are distributed appear random, but always ensure that all of the fragments from any one file will never be stored in one cloud location. The access to the files carries no reduced latency and always enable access through any two of the multiple cloud locations. If one cloud location goes down or is breached and fragments stolen or the owner is denied access to them, the system continues to provide uninterrupted access ongoing, and the bad actor has accessed useless and incomplete information. Additionally, a blockchain record of a tiny amount of data, that being a unique identifier from the file meta data and a date and time stamp, and digital signature are immediately indexed to a connected independent distributed ledger technology (DLT) or blockchain. This enables a Proof of record to prove provenance and date and time of the action of securing the file. The entire process with no technical knowledge on the user’s part creates a unique automated back-up. It also always provides continued, uninterrupted access to the complete files, even in the event of a breach occurring or a cloud service going down. Additionally, the unique “Proof of Record” is automatically generated for any future need to verify provenance and/or date and time of the securing of a specific file. Equally with the unique identifier record included, any potential dispute, or confusion over the provenance of an important file will also be capable of being resolved in seconds.
BinariiDSM is another solution that enables any user to avail of all of the benefits of the BinariiDSP solution through a simple web based Secure File Transfer protocol solution instead of a complete platform integration. This enables any user to avail of all of the benefits of DSP for any chosen files that they upload themselves and not have to connect their data collection workflows like they would do in utilising and integrating BinariiDSP.
What are the advantages of using various clouds for data storage in terms of security and accessibility? How do you manage the consistency and integrity of data across multiple cloud platforms?
Binarii labs vision is to revolutionize data security through a platform to enable enterprises to take back control, ownership, and secure custody of all of their own and their stakeholder’s data. Using multiple clouds for data storage provides advanced security and resilience by fragmenting data, and making it such that in the event of a breach of any one of the user’s cloud locations that the bad actors will always only be accessing incomplete and useless data in the form of many encrypted fragments that are only partial files, instead of complete data files.
BinariiDSP and BinariiDSM can be referred to as “data first” security because they invert the protection model embraced by other cybersecurity technologies and practices.
Instead of securing the devices, systems, and applications that house, move or process data, they both focus on protecting the data directly by encryption, fragmentation, and duplication, storing to clients three cloud with proof of record through blockchain.
Uploading to the enterprises own three clouds:
This step involves uploading encrypted, fragmented, and duplicated data to multiple locations. We recommend using a minimum of three cloud locations. Since the data is fragmented after encryption, if one storage location is breached the data is meaningless. As the fragments for an encrypted document are stored in multiple locations it is not possible to reassemble and decrypt a document from one storage location. This gives huge confidence that if a storage location is breached the data obtained is meaningless.
BinariiDSP and BinariiDSM will always enable the viewing, accessing sharing and/or downloading of a file with no latency issues. This access always occurs through any two of the three clouds, hence business continuity is assured through guaranteed continued uninterrupted access to all files, with zero down time, even if one cloud location has been breached. At all times, BinariiDSP and BinariiDSM work to access the complete file in the quickest possible time across all of the separate individual cloud storage locations that the client user has set up.
Automated Redundancy, Ensured Business Continuity, and mitigation of Disaster Recovery along with a unique independent Blockchain record for validation, transparency and proof of provenance and date and time has never been done before.
Could you elaborate on the importance of keeping data under the ownership of the clients?
Simply put, with BinariiDSP and BinariiDSM the user can trust their chosen cloud partners to continue to provide their excellent service of providing ongoing access to convenient and cost effective cloud storage, but they no longer have to trust anyone provider that complete data files will be safe and not be copied, stolen, sold, or shared in any way. BinariiDSP and BinariiDSM enable the enterprise client to retain 100% ownership and control of their own data in their own cloud and/or on-premises data storage locations and stop having to trust either third party database services and/or cloud storage providers to ensure the security of both theirs and their stakeholders’ data. This unique solution works whilst ensuring that the enterprise entirely owns and controls the cloud storage locations where this data is held and also ensures that a user can demonstrate cloud contingency, towards enhanced digital operational resilience, without the complication, expense, and greater risk of ongoing added steps, systems and integrations being implemented by technical expertise. These solutions enable the enterprise to choose approved, certified, and recognised cloud providers in the process. As a result, neither Binarii Labs nor any other provider needs to be trusted to be the custody provider for the enterprises’ data through requiring third party holding of data through either back up or primary storage. To ensure this important point is fully understood, it is worth re-iterating that through both BinariiDSP and BinariiDSM, Binarii Labs never stores client data on the client user’s behalf.
How will artificial intelligence in the near future impact the importance of data, and how do your solutions act in this regard?
In the near future, the impact of AI on the importance of data will be profound, driving a greater emphasis on data quality, integration, and ethical considerations. Businesses and organizations will increasingly rely on data to make informed decisions, leveraging AI to analyze trends, predict outcomes, and provide insights. AI can automate the collection, cleaning, and processing of data, which will streamline workflows and reduce the time and effort required to prepare data for analysis.
However, AI is already empowering a far wider sharing of all users data than ever imagined and in such a way that it is being used to better inform AI models.
Our solution will enable the certification of original data with immutable blockchain indexed proof of record for the content or IP creator. Whilst we recognise that we will facilitate how AI will assist the enterprise users in automating their work flows and their data processing generally, we are ensuring through our zero knowledge model that we will not be an intermediary or facilitator in sharing client data with any AI models in the process. Equally, we see that we will be protecting content creators through ever more valuable certified records generated by our key Proof of Record feature. This will we believe prove to be ever more valuable with the roll out of AI regulation such as the Artificial Intelligence Act in Europe.
What are the main technical challenges that Binarii Labs is currently facing? And what do you foresee as emerging challenges in the field of data security in the coming years?
The main challenge we currently face is ensuring that our platform can scale effectively to handle increasing volumes and a growing number of users without compromising performance or security. In terms of data security, emerging challenges include developing additional solutions to protect all types of data against increasingly sophisticated AI-driven cyber attacks. Additionally, we foresee an ever-evolving regulatory landscape concerning data protection laws and regulations, requiring us to continuously develop further solutions for our clients based off our core IP.
How do you think your technology will change the landscape of data management in the next five years? Are there new technologies or trends that you plan to integrate into your solutions?
Over the next five years, we envision empowering users to hold their own data and share it only when they choose to. Our world-first automated, immediate, immutable proof of record we feel will play an increasingly significant role in attestation, transparency, auditability, and efficiency of data storage and exchange. We plan to integrate new technologies and trends to further enhance these capabilities and ensure further robust data management security solutions for the future.
How do you see the future of data and what will be the potential new scenarios?
In the future, we foresee a gradual transition from data being held at the enterprise level to being held at the individual level. Each individual we believe should have control over their data and only share it when required. This shift will empower individuals with greater control over their personal information and enhance data privacy and security.
