Network Security Cybersecurity Security Zero Trust Technology Innovation

How QWERX Brings InfoSec Up to Speed

John Ellingson
John Ellingson
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Information exchange and security has been on the same path for several thousand years. This path was designed and operated for the convenience of the humans, who were the primary endpoints that exchanged information verbally, visually, or in writing. The exchanges were designed to be processed for the human brain, using human senses. There are hard limits to how much human brains can process and retain, regardless of how much information our senses can provide. It takes a human a while to learn to speak, longer to read and write and only a few become proficient at visual or musical arts.

We developed mechanical and electrical devices that aided in the exchange of information over the years, like the printing press, telegraph, telephone, radio, and television. In the mid-twentieth century, we started to develop digital means of managing information. When we did this, we infused our digital devices with our human architecture of information management -- despite the fact that digital information processing does not suffer from the constraints that human information processing does.

For as long as humans have been communicating, they have been concerned about the security of their communications. There is a long legacy of information security measures around encryption and tales of spies and secrets. 

With the advent of digital communication, there has been not only an explosion in the amount of information being exchanged, but in the amount of digital espionage to purloin that information for nefarious purposes.

The great enabler of the attacker in our current digital age is the legacy of the human information exchange architecture that still lingers in the digital ecosystem.


QWERX breaks the chains of that human legacy and for the first time enables a truly digital security architecture that is not based on some of the core constraints of the legacy systems. Most systems in use today still require the use of static information (credentials, keys, certificates) that must be stored, exchanged and protected. We designed QWERX's innovative secure device authentication technology to eliminate the vulnerabilities inherent in this protocol. A network protected by QWERX Enterprise Secure Perimeter (QESP) is immediately and continuously secured, because of what has been eliminated: static credentials.

Instead of using a stale, static credential to authenticate a device for months or years until it expires, QESP keeps pace with the digital ecosystem’s speed by generating new credentials to authenticate all connected devices on a network, multiple times per second.  Unlike a static certificate that takes up space on a device and can easily be stolen, QESP's ephemeral keys disappear as soon as they have been used and are never repeated again. Our technology leverages the fact that digital processors can operate at teraflop speed, free from the constraints of working at the trundling speed of human thought. 

QWERX technology fundamentally changes the trust landscape, enabling a shift from our ponderous, complex, static status quo to a simple, dynamic, ephemeral environment with no target information to be stored or of any use to an attacker.
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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