Thales wins Best Project at CPI's MSP Innovation Awards in New York

Thales scooped the Best Project award at Channel Partner Insight's MSP Innovation Awards on Thursday night.

We run through why the cybersecurity vendor nudged past the competition to the award.

Thales submission was centered on a use case with a Fortune 500 biotech company that was looking for a security provider for installed pacemakers on a global scale. We saw the project as a truly ambitious and innovative example of leveraging the power of IoT.

The Biotech company needed to secure data being transferred between patients and back-end networks, and for the data to remain authentic throughout the communication. This secure connection needed to be accessible under every circumstance - wherever the patient would be, anywhere in the world. Requirements also included that the firmware was to be signed by the manufacturer and verified by the pacemaker.

There was a lot of responsibility on Thales shoulders, as protecting the firmware signing keys are literally a matter of life and death for its users.

The solution included Keyfactor Control and Thales Luna HSMs. Features included secure device credential issuance and firmware code signing and verification.

Thales claims the solution allowed the customer to create a process that maintained data safety throughout every communication. The data encryption public key and root of trust were installed in the pacemaker; the pacemaker would then verify signed firmware against root of trust.

The pacemaker encrypted patient data with the public key and then that encrypted data flowed through Windows Azure, while remaining encrypted data could only be decrypted inside the manufacturer's datacenter using data encryption private key and Luna HSMs.

Now, the biotech company is planning for expansion into cloud HSMs

Thales' SafeNet Data Protection On Demand is a cloud-based platform that claims to provide a wide range of on-demand HSM and key management services through an online marketplace. It claims to make security simpler, more cost effective, and easier to manage as there's no hardware to buy, deploy, and maintain.