Cloud Security Alliance to Host Fourth Software Defined Perimeter Hackathon; Top Prize of $10,000 up for Grabs

Participants Invited to Attack Mission-Critical Cloud Application Architecture at RSA Conference; Verizon to Lead Testing Effort

San Francisco, Calif. (RSA Conference Booth #S2614) – Feb. 4, 2016 - The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), the world’s leading organization dedicated to defining and raising awareness of best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment, today announced it will hold its fourth Hackathon at the RSA Conference 2016 in San Francisco, to continue to test the CSA Software Defined Perimeter Specification V.1. A top prize of $10,000 is available to the first participant to either access or disrupt a cloud-based mission critical application.

The CSA’s Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) research project represents a breakthrough approach to security, and is a collaboration among more than 100 companies and U.S. government agencies and organizations. Companies such as Coca-Cola, Verizon, Mazda Motor Corp. and other CSA members are contributing to a new standard for perimeter security. This approach is necessary because traditional enterprise security is being compromised by non-secured mobile devices, cloud services and outsourcing. In the previous three SDP Hackathons, the focus was on security. In the fourth SDP Hackathon, the focus is on enabling mission critical cloud deployment.

Currently enterprises prefer to deploy mission critical applications in traditional data centers. This SDP Hackathon takes on the challenge of creating a highly robust infrastructure by replicating an application across multiple public clouds. Conceptually this Hackathon is researching the concept of creating a disruption-tolerant application environment by combining the resources of multiple public clouds.

In a major development, Verizon will lend infrastructure and expertise to enable the SDP Hackathon to reflect the actual architecture used to serve government and business clients. More importantly, Verizon will monitor the public cloud infrastructure to see how well the SDP is able to provide 100 percent uptime by combing the resources of multiple public clouds.

“Its great to see Verizon actively engaged in the development and testing of SDP. The market is clearly looking for a solution that helps stop cyberattacks and the added support of Verizon will help greatly in SDP’s evolution as a comprehensive solution.” said Bob Flores, the former CTO of the CIA, and current managing partner of Cognitio Corp. and SDP Workgroup Co-Chair.

“With the first three SDP Hackathons being resounding successes, it’s exciting to take this to the next level by attempting to create the first disruption tolerant application infrastructure by fusing together multiple public clouds. We’re truly at the cutting edge of researching what is possible,” said Junaid Islam, CTO of Vidder and SDP Workgroup Co-Chair.

The SDP specification uses a framework of security controls that mitigates network-based attacks on Internet-accessible applications by eliminating connectivity to them until devices and users are authenticated and authorized; thereby creating dynamically provisioned perimeters for clouds, demilitarized zones, and data center infrastructures. The SDP has been designed to be highly complementary to Software Defined Networks (SDN), the popular network layer construct that decouples routing and architectural decisions from the underlying equipment to create virtual networks. SDP traverses several open system interconnection (OSI) layers to tie applications and users with trusted networks, using vetted security models.

Full information on the SDP Hackathon will be available February 29 2016 at: http://www.hacksdp.com/.

The CSA will host SDP demonstrations at its booth, #S2614 (South Hall), at noon PDT each day of the RSA Conference (Feb 29 to March 4) in San Francisco.

About the Cloud Security Alliance

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) is the world’s leading organization dedicated to defining and raising awareness of best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment. CSA harnesses the subject matter expertise of industry practitioners, associations, governments, and its corporate and individual members to offer cloud security-specific research, education, certification, events and products. CSA’s activities, knowledge and extensive network benefit the entire community impacted by cloud — from providers and customers, to governments, entrepreneurs and the assurance industry — and provide a forum through which diverse parties can work together to create and maintain a trusted cloud ecosystem.

Media Contact

Kari Walker for the CSA
[email protected]
703.928.9996