International. NEC Corporation announced its cooperation with Cisco in order to strengthen the processes to confirm the authenticity of network equipment used for areas of security and critical industrial infrastructure. To achieve this, it used NEC's blockchain technology for network devices, and combined its fraud detection technologies with those of Cisco Systems GK (Cisco).
In response to these cyber threat challenges, NEC is cooperating with Cisco to provide a network system platform that can make use of information and communications equipment securely. The first step in this initiative is to verify the existing authenticity of the Cisco team with NEC, combining Cisco's proprietary Trustworthy solutions with NEC's lightweight manipulation and blockchain detection technology.
Trustworthy technology uses device-specific identifiers, digital signatures, and other technical elements to verify the authenticity of devices from hardware and software perspectives. This technology has already been implemented in many Cisco network devices. On the other hand, NEC's lightweight manipulation detection technology uses integrated software capable of detecting program manipulation, having the possibility to do so at high speed with execution codes consisting of only a few kilobytes, which is ideal for devices with low memory and equipment with strict delay time limitations.
By recording the historical data, inspected by these technologies on the blockchain, network administrators can verify, monitor and manage the authenticity of Cisco devices, during shipment inspection and network construction.
NEC explained that it plans to extend these efforts to operation, expansion, upgrades and maintenance, managing not only to confirm when the authenticity of a device was ensured during its life cycle, but also allowing timely detection, identification of the scope of impact and the rapid formulation of countermeasures in case of an incident.
NEC and Cisco will work to expand equipment partnerships and supply chain information control to enable monitoring and management of network equipment for critical industrial infrastructure and security areas. Both companies aim to begin deploying network equipment based on this initiative during fiscal year 2020.
