PolySwarm defines a real-time threat detection ecosystem involving enterprises, consumers, vendors and geographically-diverse security experts. Experts develop and hone competing micro-engines that autonomously investigate the latest threats, attempting to outperform their competition.
PolySwarm’s “Proof of Work” is threat detection accuracy, meaning the market rewards experts who are best able to defend enterprises and end users. Relative to today’s ad hoc market, PolySwarm will lower the barrier to entry, provide broader coverage options, discourage duplicative effort and ensure interoperability among products and threat intelligence feeds.
Crowdsale
The PolySwarm project, registered in the US, managed to raise over $24,000,000 during the duration of their crowdsale.
Concept
Polyswarm would like to replace, or at least supplement, this approach with a distributed network of analysts. The company will work on behalf of traditional security firms, taking suspicious files and pushing them out to every participant in the Polyswarm ecosystem. Those participants, ideally security experts in their own right, will analyze files, report back on threat statuses and create a series of virus definitions based on the work of thousands of individuals instead of the limited resources of a single company.
How it works
Generally, experts will participate in the network through automation, creating their own bots and scanners to capture and review files in as close to real-time as possible. Makowski is confident that the Polyswarm model will thrive on the ensuing diversity. Across the world, he said, there are hundreds of thousands of talented experts and coders who cannot access traditional employment networks, and they have skills that cover the entire threat spectrum. Ideally, Polyswarm will create a way for them to earn money by incorporating them into a talent base without the blind spots or 80/20 problems of a traditional security firm.
Token
Polyswarm will rely on its token, the Nectar, to make its model profitable for participating experts. Customers who want to send files for analysis will do so by buying Nectars, then will stake those tokens as a “bounty” for experts who take the file and determine its malicious/benign status.
Those experts can then sell the tokens off for cash. As with many cryptocurrency projects, Nectar’s value will float according to Polyswarm’s success and economy. This is a potentially effective way to recruit talent, especially from markets in the world that are under-served by traditional employers. This raises the question as to why Polyswarm is built around blockchain.
The Nectar token appears, essentially, to act as a credit that customers can buy and analysts can trade in for cash. There seems to be little reason why Polyswarm needed an independent blockchain currency instead of simply serving as a middleman for a credit-based system.
First off, PolySwarm has no in-house antivirus product, that means the success (or failure) will be entirely dependent on partnerships with established antivirus/cybersecurity companies. Also, the team are not considering integration with existing blockchain solutions for similar applications.
In today’s anti-malware industry, a single vendor (consisting of a centralized group of threat experts) will provide a “one size fits all solution”, leaving users vulnerable to attacks. With PolySwarm’s system, micro-engines developed by a global community of security experts converge to quickly analyze the threat, providing broader analysis and protection catered to your exact needs.
