Make the Great Looking Great

The Client

Ukatemi Technologies is a professional engineering company with demonstrated expertise and experience in high quality and unique cybersecurity services. Ukatemi was founded in 2012 as a spin-off company of the renowned CrySyS Lab of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics.

The Project

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and critical infrastructures were often built in an era when sophisticated malware attacks did not exist, or at least they were not common. These threats are real now and many systems still fail to catch up with them. Ichidoku makes cyber-physical networks transparent. Patchwork Operational Technology becomes visible and it will be revealed how the ecosystem is built to provide the knowledge to defend the system against attacks. It is specifically designed for industrial sized systems, including critical infrastructures.

Such a system requires extensive, yet clear and concise documentation as customers use it as a kind of a protection shield. Insufficient documentation may easily be one of the shortcomings allowing malicious actors to find a crack on that shield as it may either mislead users or may not reveal all the benefits the system offers, potentially resulting in misconfiguration or unnecessarily degraded functionality.

My contribution to Ichidoku was to author the user guide and, part of that, perform exploratory tests of the application. Performing exploratory tests of such an application is like acting as a real member of a real security defense force hidden somewhere in a top-secret facility of some TLA* governmental organization. But not just that: developing this documentation proved to be worth way much more than completing various cyber-security trainings as I had to understand down to the details what Ichidoku is for, how it works, and how you can use it.

*TLA is Three Letter Abbreviation

The Personal Side

Back in the first half of the 2010’s, one of my clients had a joint malware analysis and repository project with CrySyS Lab. Things didn’t go well and I’ve been parachuted as a crisis manager in the middle of the battlefield, and it was such a great journey to clear up conflicts and turn the project into a success. Guys from the two companies later started to work together under the umbrella of Ukatemi. It is such a great appreciation of your efforts to bring former counter-parties to a win-win situation to see them later agreeing on expressing their need to have you to contribute to their initiatives. This is something that can balance the sometimes drudgery job of authoring documentation.