PKI Cybersecurity Security Credentials Technology Innovation

Dynamic Threats Require Dynamic Security

John Ellingson
John Ellingson
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Today's cyber threat surface is much like the surface of the sun: constantly energized. The digital ecosystem moves at the speed of light and the amount of information that moves over the ever-expanding network is growing asymptotically. Yet much of our defense strategy and implementations are static or semi-static. One of the foundational bricks of technology architecture is the static credential that we rely on to authenticate both users and devices. Static credentials require substantial management resources and are frequently the first point of entry for a hacker.

Our existing cybersecurity strategies were designed by humans, to defend against humans -- who operate, at best, at the speed of double-digit bits per second. Advanced technology is capable of operating at teraflops per second. This dichotomy creates a chasm in our digital security infrastructure. In order to close the chasm, we have to do two things:

  1. Remove elements of our security architecture that were designed to operate at human speed
  2. Remove dependency on any static elements in the security infrastructure

Defense must become dynamic. It must become faster than the attacker, moving first and making the attacker react. This represents a role reversal from the current state of affairs, where enterprises react to the attacker and struggle to reduce the reaction time. 

QWERX has designed a product that moves on from static credentials to ephemeral credentials. These credentials are never exchanged or stored and can be rotated and generated multiple times per second. Unlike PKI, Ephemeral Key Infrastructure prevents many of the most common types of cyber threats by eliminating the static credential that is so vulnerable to theft or misuse. Our patented secure authentication protocol has taken the digital security paradigm out of the static 20th century into the dynamic future. 
John Ellingson

John Ellingson

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John Ellingson is the Chief Technology Officer at QWERX. John started his digital career with the Boeing Company working on the 747 aircraft in the late 1960s. He became a computer-literate attorney performing what is today known as forensic accounting. As the founding chairman of the ABA/YLD Subcommittee on Tax Treatment in Bankruptcy, John worked with the Congressional Joint Tax Committee to create the Internal Revenue Code Provision enabling the tax-free merger and acquisition of debtor corporations. This law became part of the Bankruptcy Tax Act of 1980. John had a national M&A practice in this area and obtained the first IRS Private Letter Ruling on this Code section. As a result of this practice, he observed a frequent element of white-collar crime in many bankruptcy cases, and he subsequently developed and patented a method to detect identity fraud. The product derived from that patent is still deployed at most retail banks throughout the U.S. today. This success started John on a path of protecting digital systems and identity management. He continued in this role with American Operations Corporation and ASM Research before founding infOsci LLC and later QWERX, Inc. John holds numerous method patents in digital system security. John was appointed to the United States Air Force Academy and medically separated before graduation. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Wisconsin and a Juris Doctor degree from Seattle University. For 20 years John served as a liaison officer with the United States Naval Academy and the United States Military Academy. He also served on the Service Academy Selection Boards for two U.S. Senators.

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