CONFIDENCIAL INC — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: AFX23D-TCSO1

Description

Confidencial.io is a spin-out from SRI International and built upon privacy-enabling technologies developed in two previous DARPA programs, BRANDEIS and Reliable Anonymous Communications for Everyone (RACE). SRI performs advanced research projects for U.S. government agencies including DARPA, the U.S. military services including the Department of Air Force (DAF), IARPA and the NSF. ???????Confidencial protects documents and the information within them, offering document creators and owners the ability to control data—even when it has been shared with others or accidentally spilled or compromised. Our technology protects words in a sentence, cells in a spreadsheet, or even groups of pixels within an image. This auditable tool greatly simplifies data sharing in high-compliance environments (like the financial and health care sectors) and high-stakes pursuits (like national security and defense) when using widely-used software suites. Confidencial combines techniques to both control and speed up information shared between the DOD, DAF, and allies and partners. The DAF cannot adapt commercial technology to its needs for SecAF Operational Imperatives—all of them—without protecting communications and data containing Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI). Confidencial permits protection of CUI between academia, industry, and the DAF. DAF and DOD sponsor research projects which form the technical, quantitative, and qualitative overmatch the DAF wants over all adversaries. However, those projects often generate, share, and communicate CUI data and even classified data—making this a potential vulnerability of interest to DAF and DOD adversaries for targeting, collection, and exploitation. Confidential counts 12 pilot projects with over 400 users as of February 2023. Confidencial has pilots with financial institutions and pharmaceutical companies in the U.S., Japan, and Australia. We anticipate additional pilots with U.S. aerospace firms, additional financial and pharmaceutical institutions in Q2 of CY23. Confidencial integrates into software suites with wide adoption—including Microsoft Office (incl. Teams), PDF, Google Suite, Slack, Salesforce as well as data stored in AWS and Microsoft Azure. Confidencial also offers a pathway towards protecting data against decryption by a quantum computer by seamlessly upgrading to PQC encryption once the standards are finalized by NIST. Team: Confidencial: Razmik Abnous, Co-Founder/CEO (prior CTO, Documentum, sold for $1.7B to Dell EMC; Co-Founder, CTO, Vineti which raised $110M);  Dr. Karim Eldefrawy, Co-Founder/CTO (prior SRI & HRL Labs; 75+ publications in cybersecurity/cryptography, 28+ patents, $25M+ funding from DARPA, IARPA, DHS, and NSF); and Dr. Dane Wheeler (HRL, University of Notre Dame, 25 pubs and 4 patents). SRI: Tim Ellis, Solutions Architect (prior BAE Systems).