DrZeroTrust: Hey, good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning. I don't know. Good something. My name is Chase Cunningham or Dr. Cunningham if you're being formal or Dr. Zero Trust if you're on this internet thing that everybody's on. I'm here with some folks from Enigma. We're going to talk about the cool things that they do and kind of why this is a different approach to the problem. So without further ado, you guys introduce yourself

Colby M.: Yeah, definitely. I'm a full stack engineer for the group. I've been working on the architecture and the development of this application end to end. New to the networking and cybersecurity world, and that's what I lean on these guys for heavily. ⁓ helped guide me in any of the major decisions that need to be made. I've been doing computer science and mathematics and everything for the better part of eight years. I really started to get into AI development and integration. ⁓ different training methodologies and all that good stuff that's really, you know, kind of been the buzzwords over the last three years. And I've been using that to help us rapidly plan, develop, know, any type of penetration testing or anything of that aspect. But yeah.

DrZeroTrust: So big brain on Colby. All right, Eric, your turn.

Harris Nussbaum: Hahaha

Eric Luce: Yeah, hey everybody, my name is Eric Luce. I'm basically the network security engineer, you would say, for Enigma. So as Colby said, I do kind of help out in that regard. Currently full-time, I'm a senior security engineer in the federal space. I did do nine years in the United States Marine Corps, a little bit of electrical engineering, and then on the networking security side my last couple of years while I was in.

Harris Nussbaum: Thank

Eric Luce: And again, that's you know, really I'm just basically, you know here to help provide anything I can from a network security perspective and you know Just kind of get this thing move in and it's you know, it's a great tool. So Yeah

DrZeroTrust: Harris, go ahead.

Harris Nussbaum: Well, I'm Harris Nussbaum. I also started my career in the Marine Corps about 30 years ago in 1996 and the signals intelligence community. So I was very, very lucky in kind of all the places that I got to go where I saw different sides from starting breaking into signals and triangulating where radio frequency signals came from through intelligence planning. me and things of that nature. And when I got out to the field, me, guys. I got out into the field, we a position where the guys that were the calm guys didn't have the clearance to build our networks. So we had to start building networks. And it put me into this kind of interesting perspective of how would I build a network that I couldn't break into. And in Enigma and what we're doing here, it really is just taking the best practices of the world we came from. I'm going to go with Dr. Z, if that's cool, where we came from, Dr. Z. ⁓ And you know, All those lessons learned, it really is just this new battlefield. If we look at kinetic warfare and the evolution from marching out online and shooting at each other on a knee to stealth and movement, we saw the same thing in electronic warfare. We saw a single channel unencrypted where people would speak in codes. We saw encryption, frequency hopping, and then we went to that spread spectrum methodology where signal dropped ⁓ into the noise. we saw it kind of go to where that spread spectrum went, where we're using many frequencies at the same time. They were always rotating and they always had different encryptions, red herrings. We're doing that in the network space and that's where we start. And then below it, we want to programmatically use what's already there in a different way to do what we call active failover. And that's where we're going. So the term that Gartner stole out of a paper I wrote a while ago was AMTD or automated moving target defense. And if we think of this whole thing of zero trust, I mean, all of us that came up in the military, secure compartmented information. That's all it is, right? It's literally the same stuff. And so what we're doing is we're really taking those different ways of authenticating and posture checking and things. And I'm going to let Colby super nerd out on how we're doing it. But we're taking those so we can create that moving target where we don't wait for something bad to happen. We actively call the web access firewall and fail it over and update the network. now everything's just moving around, right? We're moving the network at all times and finding best paths. We're removing all the header information. So if an enemy was able to get one, you know, chain of communication, they can't triangulate where it's coming from. Like they can with a VPN, right? We're moving that. So I say, if we really think about it like this, we're turning the network, not into a threat vector, but into the first line of defense for your architecture. And this stuff has been tested at Naval labs and other places. Myself personally, I've kind of seen it over last 10 or 15 years, 10 or 15 years evolve. And that's where we're at today. Dr. Z, you want to go into a little more technical stuff or what would help next?

DrZeroTrust: Yeah, well, want to, so for clarity sake, cause I mean, some of the market has had this thing that they've kicked around for a while about like honey potting and whatever else. We're not talking about honey potting and dynamic honey potting and whatever else we're talking about a different architectural network sort of approach to the problem. Correct.

Harris Nussbaum: Well, I mean, I would say honey potting is a part of it. Right. So one of the layers that we would put in there, think of Kubernetes containers within this ephemeral architecture that we're talking about. We're really talking about timing and alignment, right? What are the SLAs to create, destroy, move, and how do we make sure that from the network overlay perspective, we're updating everything to where it's seamless for the operator. So it's, you know, taking a lot of those concepts and putting them all into place. Think of stuff like, ⁓

Colby M.: Absolutely. Yeah, can be.

DrZeroTrust: Hmm.

Harris Nussbaum: in trade craft, right? So sorry. We go to a, you know, what do call it? A park bench. And we say the stork flies south for the winter and they respond to challenge and reply. That's our basic username and password. But think of all the other things we did. Right. We had multiple replies. Is it safe to pass the message? Is it safe, but don't pass the message danger? Like there's all these different things we can do to initiate immediate action. But the key is to get the network overlay in place first. So that way your infrastructure becomes invisible, non-routable from the internet. And we can really create this kind of closed loop ecosystem that traverses the internet, but it's not on the internet, so to speak.

DrZeroTrust: That's mean, that's a so let's just educate everybody on like what we mean by that Colby. you kind of break down technically what this you know architectural change looks like to somebody because it's I can see if people aren't us right and they're not dipped in the misery of infrastructure. They would be like what the fuck does that mean like so break it down.

Colby M.: Mm hmm. Yeah, man. And I feel like it's easier for me to do to not coming from a networking background. I've like, strive to try to get my master's degree in this as quickly as possible. Yeah, exactly. So for sure. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I try not to put my foot in my mouth sometimes and do all the highports and jargon and everything. I know when I understand something and when I don't, and that'll really, you know, fuck you up a little bit. Basically, to put it down into beginner terms. The way that I've come to understand it is the internet was designed

Harris Nussbaum: Yeah

DrZeroTrust: You're like fresh blood. You're new to, yeah. You're not disenchanted like the rest of us.

Colby M.: in order for you to find everybody. been taken advantage of. You know, all of your ports are open. ⁓ of your information is right. All of your information is being processed. Your metadata is being used to find you ⁓ exactly who you are. Basically create digital copies of you like it's all out there. Right. Since then, because the underlying infrastructure and architecture of the Internet is so wide open, it's basically been a bandaid ⁓ after process to try to protect everybody. Right.

DrZeroTrust: in little bit.

Colby M.: A solution that we are actively attempting, and I say attempting because it is a big problem to Spearhead, is applying that protection to the device and layering it from there, decoupling it, doing all that kind of good stuff. And basically what I mean is before a single packet of data is sent to the network or the internet, it has to be verified. So we're not even creating a connection. until every single bit is verified, whether it's through a 509 certificate, MTLS, ⁓ other policies that we have set up or services that we have set up, that is ⁓ first line of defense. And because the overlay in architecture, because of how it's architected, it really doesn't even exist until a connection is made, if that makes sense, which is kind of... I guess the part of calling it dark in a way. Yeah, if you want to expand on that, Harris.

Harris Nussbaum: No, I'll just give the analogy. Like, you know, I say, if I was talking to my mom, said, imagine looking down at the U S and all the roads are the information superhighway. Well, imagine now we snap our fingers and they all disappear. But when you're ready to travel the road, once you authenticate, once you prove who you are, once you prove where you're allowed to go, then and only then is an invisible road created for you and only you to where you're allowed to go. And when you're done with that session, it goes away. So that's where we talk a lot about. preventing the kill chain before it starts, right? We're defeating it right at the detection part in the beginning to where there is nothing to find. We've had some good Harry Potter references too, if anyone's seen that movie where the house isn't there until they walk up and it sort of constructs in front of them. And when they go away, it goes back down and all you see is the woods. Forgive me, I'm a nerd, but we'll go with the Harry Potter reference. But Eric, mean, you've been really at the forefront of networking for a long time and you know, It's funny, we were coming into this show and Dr. Z said, feel free to bash vendors. Well, I don't want to bash the vendors. There's like a big player in the room that everybody knows Zscaler. So comparatively, you know, the complexities and how hard it is and give us a little bit of your take on that and kind of where we go when we just are able to start with the network and implement these components.

Eric Luce: Yeah, I mean, definitely. So the first thing I like to do is make things simple, right? Especially for the individual that's not in the networking or, you know, the things that we do on a day-to-day basis, right? we're really looking at is ZTA, right? Zero Trust Architecture, right? That's the kind of the thing that's coming up in the industry now. ⁓ see the federal space moving into it. A lot of, you know, really big corporate companies are moving to Zero Trust Architecture. And, you know, one of the key players, Zscaler, for example. And you know, that costs a lot of money, right? You know, in order for you to get zero trust, you know, networking, you know, integrated into what you're doing at home, it's nearly impossible unless you want to spend a lot of money to do so. And that kind of moves me into, you know, the EPN that is being developed, right? Right now, the industry standard is, you know, VPN, you know, virtual private network. That's how a lot of people try to bypass things, know, restrictions within countries. Maybe you want to watch a TV show or something that you're not allowed to watch in Japan. ran into that, you know, a lot of the time when I lived over there. Yeah. Good old Nord VPN, Proton VPN. And those are awesome tools, right? But what we're doing that's so unique is we're building that infrastructure on a zero trust platform, right? Which is very unique to what other companies have not really done.

DrZeroTrust: do that when I travel international. I fire up old NordVPN.

Harris Nussbaum: I'm

Colby M.: Mm-hmm.

Eric Luce: ⁓ So, you know, when you create that account, right, you're having an identity created for you within our tenants that basically is allowing you to traverse, you know, your network and everything through our, you know, basically through our infrastructure. And it's a lot cheaper than spending millions on something, right? And, you know, this is only the start, right, a simple VPN, ⁓ solution, but... You know, it's going to get to the point where, you know, maybe you might, and like I brought this up in another, another time, right? A lot of nerds of us, right? We, we love to create, you know, virtual machines, you know, maybe different ways to get into the network to access those machines. Now, if you use EPN, right, in the future, maybe you can add that as a service that only your identity is able to access. And that is a very core tenant of zero trust, right? Identity based authentication, not IP based, which Generally, you know you get a static IP it never changes now It's identity based and you know, there's just so much things to do from there but I guess what I'm getting at is, you know what we're building is just It's just starting and it's really gonna just open up you know so much more things to do and a VPN is a great way to start because So many people use VPNs without even knowing it, right?

Harris Nussbaum: Right. Yeah.

DrZeroTrust: You said VPN and EPN. Let's educate everybody on what we mean by the differences between those two.

Eric Luce: Mm-hmm. Harris, you want to take that over from the name and all that? Because I know it's a...

Harris Nussbaum: So. Sure, sure. We're just, we call it the Enigma Private Network. It's the concept of bringing to the individual consumer, the privacy and security of zero trust connection from their terminal or phone to the, or from their laptop or phone, you know, to the internet. And what we're also bringing into the individual are those concepts that only today exist at the institutional level, where just like Eric said, you can be a... single person user and have some architecture at AWS, some in on-prem, some in your living room, wherever. And you can create all that segmentation and everything right within the platform. And everything's working from the perspective of B2B where we can go in. And that's what we're really good at in the beginning is going in and looking at an organization and saying, okay, here's the number of virtual zones. Here's the number of connections. Here's the OT stack that needs to be behind it. Here's the amount of traffic. And we can understand how to do that implementation plan because right now we're thinking about all these quantum and agentic security issues. Think about just what Eric said, right? Bringing the identity of an agent right into the network where you're not just policy enforcing where that agent can go. That agent has to authenticate just like anybody else. And then, and only then we create the connection to where it's allowed to go. And if it starts to act awry, we can cut the connection and turn the power off, right? I mean, these are the things that open up. But it all starts, like we say in relationships in the military and business, it all starts with communication. We have to nail the network and implementing this network overlay is the first step in getting where we need to go.

DrZeroTrust: So let's talk about difficulty of this, because that's where most folks run into the wall, is they think that the migration to these newer protocols, newer practices, more safe architectural designs and ⁓ are complicated and expensive and whatever else. When somebody says that to you guys at Enigma, what's the ⁓ Where you go? No, you're incorrect.

Harris Nussbaum: Yeah. And so the main thing is we're going to, sorry, Zscaler, we're going to pick on you. If you're going to do a Zscaler implementation, it requires a lift and shift of your entire infrastructure into their architecture. And there's a lot of work to set up your firewalls and, know, Eric, mean, how many different policies and things have we set up the other world just to get one implementation done at an organization? Is it hundreds now? mean,

Eric Luce: I mean, it's pretty astronomically high, right? And the work that goes into integrating, you know, a ZTA network into your infrastructure is, takes years, if we're being honest, right? Because it's not easy and, you know, as you said, it's just, it's a lot of work that goes into it, a lot of new security protocols and things of that nature. So, go ahead.

Harris Nussbaum: And that's the nice thing about what we've done is we've really built on an open source technology called Open City. And what we're able to do is quickly integrate to what you have without ripping and replacing it in an unobtrusive way. So we need to know the number of virtual zones. We don't care if it's Azure East or West or AWS or Google or an on-prem. We just have to identify where it's going to be and where we're going to house the edge that sits in front of your architecture and handles connection to the network, right? But it's already integrated to the point where we can bring in your identity provider and those rules and things that you have set up are now enforced from the control plane. And that's the key difference between these modern overlays that we're talking about. It's not just the data that's going back and forth on one plane. There's a separate distributed control plane. That's governing and updating the data plane that's moving the data at all times. And it's unaware of the payload and information within it. So moving from, you know, one of the things we set out to do was to have it be very easy and unobtrusive. And we've done a lot of work with our partners and the original creators of the open standard to really improve it and harden it. Colby, I mean, you've done a lot of work. We're, we're working on the split traffic right now to where. Instead of being in the quote, quote, free copying mode, we can use multiple channels at the same time. And, you know, the, both the security and performance implications on that are massive. ⁓ because, know, if you imagine one of them goes down, we're not going down, we're not losing connectivity. We've still got two or three others and we can respawn a new path over here. Those are the kinds of things that we're adding into this infrastructure right now. And we're trying to nail it from the EPN perspective. which is just simply a VPN replacement to be more secure. It makes it so that your home machine is non-routable from the internet and it forces any traffic coming to your machine to go through the fabric. So now, know, our intent and our plans are protect the humans to keep adding in layers of stuff in that architecture that normally only a massive organization would have like a web access firewall or an internet access point that's doing deep packet inspection and preventing those payloads from coming in and taking over your system. And the thing to remember, I believe the number is greater than 80 % of all VPNs are owned by the same company. They might be called different names, but they're owned by the same people. So what do

Colby M.: Definitely all wire guard all open VPN. Yeah

DrZeroTrust: Yeah, it's kind of like sunglasses, right? Bra bands and the Walmart stuff are all made by the same manufacturer. It's just a logo on the other side that makes it 200 bucks.

Colby M.: Everybody just wanted to repackage it and make some money off of it.

Harris Nussbaum: But think of it from an Intel perspective, right? I mean, we came from that world. What do you think they're doing with that metadata? They're protecting you from everybody else, but they've got it and they're selling it.

DrZeroTrust: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's why like whenever somebody talks about privacy in today's world, I just go like, yeah, don't, nah, like privacy is dead. whatever, I don't care. I mean, like I just, anytime somebody starts talking about privacy and privacy laws and whatever else, I immediately just glaze over. Cause I'm like, this is a waste of my time. you know, I mean, until you find an electron that obeys borders, the rest of it.

Colby M.: I mean, you're not wrong.

Harris Nussbaum: Right. Yeah China did do that where they were able to ⁓ quantum entangle two, I think, protons and send one to the space station and one here and then manipulate the binary on either end. So it's coming.

Colby M.: No, exactly. Yeah, there's always overhead.

DrZeroTrust: Now that sounds like somebody just like power pointed their way through something. Cause I'd be like, prove it. And they go, well, we can't prove it. Like, all right, sure.

Eric Luce: you

Colby M.: Yeah, it's crazy how much, you know, like piggybacking off of proof too, with so many VPNs and other consumer privacy and security products, it's all policies, right? There's very little proof. They're like, show me that you are not actively decrypting and selling my data or that it's not compromised.

DrZeroTrust: That's why whenever somebody says like zero knowledge or something like that, I'm like, that's not really possible, but it sure sounds cool because ⁓ knowledge. then how the fuck do you know what's actually going on there?

Colby M.: Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly. mean, that's what, yeah. And then, then you have somebody to break it down and it's like, ⁓ okay, cool. You repackage it. Got it. Yeah.

Harris Nussbaum: We like buzzwords and acronyms, right?

DrZeroTrust: Yeah. Well, it's yeah zeros. It's zero knowledge stuff. What does that mean? I know that's those are words I want to know what those words mean, you

Colby M.: Yeah. So what's really great too, know, calling it an EPN, we have an ephemeral private network and there's so many things that I can get into. And I always try to keep myself on track. You know, talking about that decoupling and about the privacy policies and everything, we can actually export ⁓ our for how we set up our controllers and edge routers. And we show users, ⁓ you know, is the code that we're running and we can them the architecture that we have and literally ⁓ how it is we cannot see the data that's being transported. it helps us in a lot of different avenues when we're like, Hey, as a company, we are the transport and routing layer that makes sure that you are safe ⁓ and don't have access to it. And because of how we have our infrastructure set up, ⁓ we your identity from ⁓ everything that ties back to your personal information, your email, whatever. And we can do that through you know, cryptographic numbers or whatever you want to call it right on your device. And it makes everything so much easier, right? It's, you know, we give you this generated identity that expires after a certain amount of time. You connect to the network and it has smart routing that routes your traffic through a certain edge router that has a personal IP address on it that can be spun up and spun down at a moment's notice. and we can spawn thousands of them or a hundred thousands of them, right? And then every single connection that you make from your device can go out of a different edge router. And there's so many layers of security. There's so many ways that we can decouple from who you are. And there's so many ways that we can't actually see what data is being processed. Now we might, you you can be very clever, right? And say, Okay, this edge router is here. has this IP address. Let me position myself on this side of it and the other side of it. And then when I have a thousand users going through that one edge router, let me try to set up timing to see if I can figure out through the metadata and fingerprinting, if I can figure out who this person is. And I'm like, if you can do that, kudos. Because with how much we're spawning these and de-spawning them and doing complete epoch changes and you know, everything that we have is ephemeral. So we can literally push a button. and spawn an entirely new network fabric you know you're starting from ⁓ again so ⁓ just the way that it's developed is hard. ⁓

Harris Nussbaum: Yeah, it's all. Yeah, we like to say it's all about time, right? Like most people, what we want to do is reduce the amount of time to where there could possibly be a threat and then do a bunch more security during that time. And then when we're not transmitting, for instance, then that connection should never exist. So there's nothing to detect. Right. There's no keep alive. There's no none of that stuff that's going on that gives indication as to where you are. And to Kobe's point. There's things in the fabric to detect like jitter and latency and things of that nature. So if we see something happening at one of those edge routers, it's automatically, we're not going to wait to find out if it's a threat. We're just going to assume it's a threat and go ahead and kill it, move somewhere else and take that down. Right.

DrZeroTrust: So is this, is this approach mainly y'all finding viable? Like is it B2C, B2B, enterprise only, small biz? Like where's the, the common sort of use case?

Harris Nussbaum: It's been in the B2B. ⁓ It's in, I think, seven now out of the top 10 US banks. The underlying network technology is in one of the major OT providers, OT stack now, because the way in which the latency reduced ⁓ a lot of the problems with not being able to put ⁓ critical infrastructure and OT behind the network. And that was all due to the the latency sensitivity to those very systematic processes between machines. And when you start putting in, you know, 80 milliseconds each way round trip for communication, those OT devices were getting out of whack. So there's a lot of those problems that have been solved. And really what we're doing is we're packaging it into a way where we're going B2C as a product, in addition to the consulting that we do to bring it to the average user and then building, you know, deployment We have plans for deployment scripts and other things to make it really, really easy for a small business to get behind this architecture. So they have the same defenses as any of the big guys.

DrZeroTrust: mean, that's where it's like, there's, think that's where one of the largest disconnects in this whole market is, right? Is like you were saying, Colby and Eric earlier, if I'm an enterprise, I can continue to just vomit money into the endless pit of cyber. And eventually I'll have enough shit in there that something works. statistically speaking, if you look at the trends for bad guys, they've kind of moved away from enterprises because it's a hard target just by the nature of all the money.

Colby M.: lose a lot of money a time, yeah.

DrZeroTrust: Yeah. I mean, eventually you have to suck less. I mean, that's kind of how it works. now it's like small businesses, vendors, third parties, contractors, and whatever, but they're not the folks that will ⁓ able to ⁓ this stuff or install it or figure out how to use it and those types of things. So it just, you know, ⁓ military parlance, right. It's the self licking ice cream cone of misery. and it just keeps on going. So I think that that's interesting that y'all are saying that you're moving towards a capability set for.

Colby M.: Right,

Harris Nussbaum: ⁓

DrZeroTrust: SMBs and maybe even consumers I would assume some point.

Colby M.: Absolutely, yep.

Harris Nussbaum: Yeah, right now we're in private beta. We're about to extend it to our community beta with EPN to where you just go to the website, download it, click register, pay through Stripe and turn it on. And it works for internet traffic. And ⁓ our whole is to start adding features and functions over the next year, you know, to where you can do your own segmentation and micro segmentation from your VPN replacement. Right. Just a personal dashboard. And the great thing about that identity is now you don't have to have through the front end, a lot of technical knowledge. You can just think of it as driving from here to there on this identity, on this machine that I want to go to this machine that I've got in the cloud that's located here. And I'm the only one that's allowed to go there. And because the plane knows that, well, when you go in and you register and the posture checking is done and all that. Then we make that connection for you. And now think about being able to set them up or think about being able in one session. Colby came up with this the other day and I'm all giddy over it, but being able to point to different edge routers in different places in the world without having to go and turn on and off the, know, VPN. It's just like, okay, I want Netflix to go over here. I want my Microsoft stuff to go over here. I want my Spotify stuff to go over here, whatever it is. That's possible. as we nail this initial step. And we're at like that final one yard line of performance testing and packaging. ran into some administrative hurdles with Windows and Apple to, you know, make, you know, get the permission to do this, but ⁓ right there. We're going to continue the beta testing and ⁓ this is GA within the next several weeks. But that would be the...

DrZeroTrust: GA for this consumer side.

Harris Nussbaum: for the consumer side, for the VPN replacement that we call EPN. We refer to it either as Enigma private network or an ephemeral private network, but really that's what it is. ⁓ That's big difference, right? VPNs are stationary, point to point, always on. We are ephemeral, always moving and only on during session.

DrZeroTrust: Yeah, I think ephemerality is something that when the market kind of first got kicking around, no one really gave enough credence to. But yeah, but those of us that came up in the encrypted comm space, like we were always very big on, if you need to talk, you talk and the comms go. And then other than that, there's no connection. that's, it's right. mean, cause it was just risk. was like, why would I keep this channel open when the bad guys are sitting there listening? I mean, even if you hear me,

Colby M.: They'll don't. Right. No persistent. Yeah. Point of attack. Yeah.

Harris Nussbaum: So I was. Yeah.

DrZeroTrust: tell you something at least you're not listening to the rest of the conversation.

Colby M.: Mm-hmm.

Harris Nussbaum: 100%. Actually. So I've.

DrZeroTrust: I mean, that's where we're moving, I think, because it seems like ephemerality now is coming back into the market as far as like a valid approach to the problem.

Colby M.: Especially with AI, Mm-hmm.

Harris Nussbaum: And we've seen it. Like I said, we've seen it, right? Think of frequency hopping. And it was funny. was in a camp. I was in 29 palms for combined arms exercise and we're the second guys, right? So we're out there doing the listening and all the things. And something happened where the coyotes figured out what we were doing. And I was like, there's no freaking way. And I looked over at the radio and I realized, you know what? They've got all the crypto and so do we. So I basically said, all right, I put one of my PFCs on it and I had them look through every crypto and all the channel information until we found the coyotes communications channel. And then, you know what I did with our radios? I just literally rolled dice and set a random time for the frequency hop in coordination. So all of our radios were using the same stuff, but we set this random time and now the coyotes couldn't hear us anymore. And it was kind of funny at the end, they were all pissed off and they're like, you guys can't do that. And this and that, I was like, We're the Intel guys, bro. You pay us to be sneaky bastards like that. Like you should be so happy.

DrZeroTrust: We can do kind of whatever we want. yeah, well, and for everybody listening to this, when he says coyotes, he means people smugglers, not the dog type.

Harris Nussbaum: Yeah.

DrZeroTrust: Cause somebody out there would be like, wait, a dog is on blah, that'd be. Yeah. Every, every time I think that we've hit like the floor on stupidity, someone always lowers the bar. No. Yeah. Just for clarity sake, there's no dog coyotes using comms, you know, to talk across wifi or whatever else. I mean, it's, I had to have to give that disclaimer, but it is a thing. So, so where do we go from here? Like what's, ⁓ next? Where's the market lineup? Like.

Colby M.: On the radio, these guys are crazy. Yeah.

Harris Nussbaum: Challenge accepted.

Colby M.: That's too funny.

Harris Nussbaum: 100%. But yeah, I

Colby M.: That's great.

DrZeroTrust: you know, and then I think just to kind of wrap up like talk about the the value proposition on this and just from every aspect right like I think it'd be valuable for people understand the cost model the you know security sort of implications is there a compliance side of this thing that's more valid or viable those types of things and y'all just you know wrap and roll with it Eric what do you what's your point on this?

Eric Luce: Well, let me have Harris start off on the business side of it and then I can tune in or chime in from like a technical standpoint if that's fine with you Harris.

Harris Nussbaum: Yeah, no worries. So look, one of the fundamental problems that we have and why organizations, in my humble opinion, are still at risk is because we've stovepiped these different areas, right? The network guys over there, infrastructure guys over there, cyber guys over there, they've all got their own PNL, they're fighting for budget. But if you don't think about them together, it's not going to work. So what we're able to do by layering in this virtual network first, and that's the first step always in our process, is We're able to simplify, we're able to unify disparate systems, we're able to reduce system count oftentimes and get rid of some of the old technologies like the VPNs or the MPLS lines. And so it really is one of those times in kind of evolutionary history where you can have it better, cheaper and faster. You're reducing TCO, you're reducing risk because the setup is easy, it's identity based, it's policy and ⁓ the ports are naturally closed. You're not making exceptions. all stay closed, right? It's outbound traffic only rules and things of that nature. So it is that time with what we're doing where we can go in and make it easy. And what we're doing is focusing on that front end where it's really easy for the users, the automated collection of the information of what are your virtual zones? How many users do you have? What type of traffic? What are the constraints? And we can take that information and we're creating the automation to auto deploy all that stuff. on top of what is already automated within the existing systems. So that's the stage that we're at right now. But from a perspective, I would say if we go up to against a Zscaler by layering the network technology first and then going through the process of orchestrating the movement behind it programmatically, pick any number in Zscaler that it would be quoted and we should be able to at least cut that number in half.

Colby M.: Well, also too, just as like a basic consumer, if you walked up to me and said, Hey, in the world of AI now where even people who don't know how to hack have more capabilities to hack than ever for $10 a month, I can have an enterprise level security product that I can connect to with the push of a button. And instantly all of my traffic is more secure than it's ever been routed more intelligently, more performant. That's a no-brainer in my opinion. And also if you have people who, know, they really understand VPNs.

DrZeroTrust: All right, let's do this.

Colby M.: For those who don't understand it, you know, they funnel 100,000 people to one IP address on the one server, right? That doesn't change. They decrypt your traffic, probably sell it. And, you know, being a target right now is, it's a risk more than it's ever been. Because in the past, it was like you had to accumulate a lot of resources to take advantage of that data. And that's not the case anymore. That your average Joe can really compromise. a lot of people when they get their hands on something and having one point of failure is just it's it's unacceptable. Now it really is. I there's too many capabilities out there. you from an ethics standpoint, too, and a business standpoint, I feel like it's unacceptable to keep necessary from people and keeping it behind a really large paywall. ⁓ You know, in eyes, it's fair. And you know, life's not fair. And I understand that in everything. But when we have the capabilities, you know, you want to you want to make sure that everybody's protected and everybody has a chance. And I think that's a big stance that we carry, you know.

DrZeroTrust: Yeah, I'm with you, man. No. No, that's great. Cause I mean, I tangential this, but like I've, I've been working with some folks and the, the, the premise that we've put up in front of some works on the Hill is like in a digital world. If you accept that we live in a digital world, which we do, and you want everyone to be equal under the digital sort of, you know, ecosystem, then everyone should have the right to operate securely online. And if you don't believe that, then you should just take the internet away from folks. Cause that's not right. mean, you know, you can

Colby M.: Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

DrZeroTrust: fucking moan on about privacy all day long, like really what we're talking about, like operating on the internet should be something that can be safe if you want it to be safe. You know, if you want to be, you know, stupid and go running around butt naked on the internet, go nuts, but.

Colby M.: It is what it is.

Harris Nussbaum: Hahaha

Colby M.: For sure, absolutely. And then you're also...

Harris Nussbaum: Insert.

Colby M.: Sure.

Harris Nussbaum: Yeah, I remember yeah when I was a kid it was don't take pictures of the stupid shit you did and now it's like everybody just does it but ⁓ Eric what Eric

DrZeroTrust: Yeah. Oh, I'm so glad that none of this stuff was around when I grew up. Cause yeah, it's

Colby M.: over. Career's before it starts. ⁓

DrZeroTrust: Yeah, I'd be lucky if I could like be a janitor at Arby's. Yeah.

Colby M.: That's funny.

Harris Nussbaum: ⁓ that's funny. But yeah, Eric, I wanted to turn it back over to you because if you had anything to add to the last little topic.

Eric Luce: Yeah, well, mean, just the one thing, like I said, I like to keep things simple, right? And I know what a lot of what we've been talking about is seem like it's coming from like an enterprise level, you know, small business level where, you know, we're going to do all these things with your network with, you know, Enigma. But really, I mean, it starts at the consumer level. Like what we're building right now is for the average Joe that's, you know, possibly listening to this, right? It's for the average consumer that basically wants to get away from what's the current trend of public VPNs like Nord or Proton. And you know, you're being given access to this security tool, this network architecture that you know, literally the highest levels of the federal government are using at the tip of your fingers for correctly if I'm wrong, was $10, $10, right? And you know, you're yeah, and you know, this, you know, you might not be a big business, right? So you're able to

Colby M.: Mm-hmm.

Harris Nussbaum: Yeah, we start at $10 a month for the basic plan.

Eric Luce: this at a very low cost. ⁓ kind one of the things that I find the most unique about this because it just starts at the consumer level and we can build all the way up to enterprise 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 users if it gets there. So that's really just what I find unique about this entire product. ⁓

Harris Nussbaum: And I'll say, think, I mean, we've all done it, right? We've been in technology for years. go to these trade shows and events and everything else. And I swear to God, every year I go to these things, it's the next flag officer, the next executive that's talking about the same risks, the same problems. And they're going to keep going to the same old big box sellers and expect a solution. Well, the big box guys aren't motivated by that, right? They're driven by P and L and their, you know, their board and profitability. They're not beholden to end. exactly. Right. So it's like, okay, let's really look at this a different way. If you want to solve the problem, this is the future, right? We're not going to just have API end points that sit there and wait to be attacked or authenticated. You're going to summon them to a specific location at a specific time, do your work, and then it's going to go away. And the only way to get from here to there is to start by fixing what's wrong with the network. And I think somebody said it, maybe Eric or Colby talked about the band-aids.

Colby M.: Ethics what? Right.

Harris Nussbaum: layers, well, everyone else has taken that approach of let's fix each individual problem and try to stack this large, disparate thing together. But what about, let's go and address the root cause and fix that. And if we start there, we remove a lot of the conditions that caused the problems in the first place. And that's where we're focused. and I were sergeants in the Marine Corps. I was the guy that when you were the colonel, we're tired of dealing with the problem. was like, Nisbaum, go figure it out. I don't care how you do it.

Colby M.: that's profitable that keeps problems.

Harris Nussbaum: Well, we're sitting here with our hands up in the back of the room going, guys, here's the solution, right? Or we're worried about our critical infrastructure. We're worried about, you know, loss worried about IP theft. Well, here's a way to just solve it quickly because we're able to integrate to what's already there. We're not having to rip and replace. You you talked about cost. Think about we can extend the end. can extend the life of what you have as opposed to the normal refresh of ripping it out, buying a new. So there's so many ways, the simplification of people management and time. really looking to bring it to the masses and we believe we have to go quickly because it really is a different world now and there's a lot of cyber threat out there.

DrZeroTrust: Yeah, well I'm looking forward to seeing the small business slash personal version because when it's out there I want to know because I'd like to try it out and ⁓ glad to throw it through the the socials here as well. So we'll put that out there for people. ⁓

Colby M.: Absolutely.

Harris Nussbaum: Yeah, we'll, uh, w literally, Colby, what do you think? I mean, we're, think the last thing is just the window or I'm sorry, the Mac OS, uh, build that's going.

Colby M.: Yep. Yeah, we're doing that. And we're still in early beta right now. a very small team. But you know, we're making, excuse me, ample progress with it. And we're trying to get you know, yourself and your communities on it so that we can find any type of, ⁓ you bugs or flaws or anything and make it secure ⁓ as, as possible. And also performant. I didn't talk about this, but you know, I'm a big gamer and I love low latency. ⁓ high throughput, when things are fast and they work and they're reliable, that's something that we're actively trying to do. And I don't only want to give you the most security, I want to give you the most bang for your buck in terms of performance, because performance junkie through and through. It does, it does. Yeah, absolutely. When it becomes inconvenient,

DrZeroTrust: Yeah, mean if security slows you down people stop using it.

Eric Luce: Yeah, they get away from it. They turn it

DrZeroTrust: have the most important question I'll ask right now since Colby said it is Colby do you play Helldivers? Oh, yes, like come on man. Alright, so yes, anyone that does listen to this I'm a Helldivers fanatic. yeah.

Colby M.: Dude, no, not yet. It sounds like I need to, so I'll get on it. Yeah.

Harris Nussbaum: ⁓ man, I I gotta give a shout out then. we have a friend Tyler Boone. He's got a project out of Atlanta called Ty project, and he makes physical merchandise and stuff, including these cool NFC enabled dog tags and whatnot. And he made this special edition hell divers one when something came out and we're all excited because I think the CEO or somebody of hell divers tweeted it. So I'll have to send that to you and get you one of them. But what I will promise is, ⁓

Colby M.: Yeah, I will hit you up for sure.

DrZeroTrust: Hell yeah.

Colby M.: Yeah, definitely.

Harris Nussbaum: Within the next two weeks or the next week or so, as soon as we're ready, we'll hitch up Dr. Z and we'll make sure that we get you one of the trial subscriptions to use it for a few months.

Colby M.: For sure.

DrZeroTrust: That would be awesome. Yeah, that'd be great. I'd love to get my hands in it and kind of see how things go and I'll pass it on to all the folks that ⁓ the three people listen to my podcast or whatever. So we'll wind that up too. Cool. Well, I appreciate you guys coming on ⁓ the folks that don't know. I've been tracking these guys down for months. Like we kept having misconfigurations and

Colby M.: Right. Yeah.

Harris Nussbaum: Yeah, right.

DrZeroTrust: changing times and all the other crap that happens. But finally, after lots and lots of tracking, got them on the show. So thank you, the team from Enigma, people that are out there looking up. Yeah, you guys real quick, give your site and everything else so the folks can find you online.

Harris Nussbaum: Thank you, man. Yeah. So the site is, ⁓ E N G a.io. We like to say there's no I in Enigma. and, the story behind that is that the URL was available and we liked the name. So, ⁓ very technically a sound story, ⁓ but, and if you want to get nerdy, go to docs.enigma.io ⁓ and we, put a lot of it out there. and yeah, we're,

Colby M.: Love it. That's right.

DrZeroTrust: Hey, if it works, it works.

Harris Nussbaum: We're kind of bridging across the web to web three space. And, you know, as we layer out the infrastructure, it's going to be the notion of what products can we push that allow people, individual and small business access to these things. Like in the crypto world, for instance, think of the wallets. You have a cold wallet with a lot of value in it, and you plug it into the internet to make a transaction and many, many, many attacks start right away. Well, now they're not going to be able to see your actual cold wallet because it's going to go through the fabric out through an edge router that can be moving around. And if anybody gets to there, we can just kill it and move it somewhere else. So there's a lot of little tricks that we can do ⁓ with the network when we have control of it the way we do from a supply chain kind of perspective.

Colby M.: lot of applications.

DrZeroTrust: network. All roads lead to Rome. People forget that, right? network is weird. Amen. All right, well there you have it. ⁓ them up on engma.io. Reach out to Colby and Harris and Eric and ⁓ Marcus on their team and some other smart folks as well. So we follow up and it sounds like once I get my hands on it, I'll be able to kind of do a dog and pony show. So that'll be next.

Harris Nussbaum: It's all about communications. Yes, sir.

Colby M.: Mm-hmm. There you go. Thank you for your time. Yeah, nice meeting you.

Harris Nussbaum: Awesome, man. We appreciate that. Thank you, Dr. Z. Have a good day.

Eric Luce: Yeah, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

DrZeroTrust: Alright.

Eric Luce: Thank you.