Incubator: Canary Data

August 7, 2017

Incubator

At Jemurai, we have started incubating products.  We love security consulting and the engineering we do there, but there is something amazing about building a product.  In particular, I constantly crave the experience of pushing the limit and trying something new and a little different.  I’m even embracing marketing and failing fast.  So each month, we take an idea out of our product backlog of ideas and try pushing ourselves with it a bit.

This month, we’re pushing the canary.

Canary in the Coal Mine

What is the canary in the coal mine all about anyway?  Well, miners used to take a canary with them into the mine so that if carbon monoxide levels rose enough to be dangerous, they would know.  The canary would die and they would hopefully get out before the CO caused problems for them too.

In short, the canary is an early warning signal.

How Does Canary Data Work?

The way we envision canary data working is that we provide known data that is bad.  Sounds silly, right?  Except that we track it and know who we gave it to, when and for which of their environments.  Then we search for the known bad (canary) data in increasingly sophisticated ways and when we find it, it is a strong indication that a client has had a breach (of any kind!) at a certain point in time, in a certain location, application, part of their network, cloud, etc.

By tracing which canary data shows up, we can help both notify clients early of potential issues but also pinpoint where and which parts of their operations may have issues.  Its an early warning signal.

Input?

As with any “incubator” project, we have a lot of fresh ideas about how it could work, but it will have to be tested in the wild – so we’re interested in input or anyone that would like to help us test it in the realz.  Contact me to talk further.

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Matt Konda

Founder and CEO of Jemurai

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