New Knoxville-based start-up licenses cybersecurity technology from ORNL
Penguin Mustache was co-founded by former ORNL scientist Jared M. Smith, the technology’s creator, and his business partner, entrepreneur Brandon Bruce, to create an offering named the Evasive.ai platform.
A technology developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and used by the U.S. Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NAVWAR) to test the capabilities of commercial security tools has been licensed to a new Knoxville-based cybersecurity start-up.
Penguin Mustache was co-founded by former ORNL scientist Jared M. Smith, the technology’s creator, and his business partner, entrepreneur Brandon Bruce, to create an offering named the Evasive.ai platform. Smith, who worked in ORNL’s Cyber Resilience and Intelligence Division for six years, created the technology — the adversarial malware input generator, or AMIGO — at the request of the Department of Defense.
AMIGO was created as the evaluation tool for a challenge issued by NAVWAR for artificial intelligence (AI) applications that autonomously detect and quarantine cybersecurity threats. NAVWAR is an operations unit within the U.S. Navy that focuses on secure communications and networks.
Drawing on more than 35 million malware samples — some publicly available and others never before seen — AMIGO generates optimally evasive malware in tandem with the training information needed for a security system to detect it in the future.
In the news release announcing the license, Smith likened the process to vaccine development. “It’s as if we generated a million virus variants and a million vaccines to protect against them — we can collapse that into one vaccine and inoculate everyone. They’re protected against the threat, but also all the natural evolutions of the threat going forward.”
For Bruce, himself a serial entrepreneur, it’s an important technology to commercialize. “Bad actors are already using artificial intelligence to advance their attacks,” he said. “As open AI tools improve, attempts to penetrate security systems will increase in volume and sophistication.”
And, how about the unique name of the start-up? The playful name is a riff on the problem of a small mutation enabling a virus to evade existing defenses — a penguin disguised with a mustache, the Co-Founders said.
