October is a time for carving pumpkins, watching football, and celebrating Cybersecurity Awareness Month!
To mark the occasion, the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), known for fielding and rapidly scaling commercial technology across the U.S. military, published a blog post featuring an exclusive interview with VIA, titled “Capitalizing on Commercial Technology to Promote Cybersecurity across the DOD.”
U.S. Navy Cyber Warfare Engineer and Program Manager at DIU, Jonathan Rogers, traveled across the country to VIA’s HQ in Somerville for the Q&A-style interview with VIA’s CEO, Colin Gounden. During the interview, Colin and Jon talk about the ways blockchain, data security, and decentralization are critical to improved cybersecurity. Check out the video below:
Patrick Gould, Director of DIU’s Cyber and Telecoms (C&T) Portfolio, covered details of the interview in the blog post and shared how VIA and DIU’s relationship started:
“In an effort to shift away from a network-centric paradigm to one that is more data-centric, DIU, Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Atlantic, and Navy PEO Digital and Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NIWC) issued a solicitation in Fall 2022 for a fully distributed, trustless data execution model leveraging blockchain and other Web3 technologies. Boston-based company VIA was selected for its software-based solution that includes quantum resistant encryption and zero-knowledge proofs, simultaneously enhancing security posture while enabling faster decision making by giving rapid access to essential data for all mission partners.”
For the full blog post that provides more detail on our relationship with the Department of Defense and more specifically, the recent project with DIU, visit the DIU website.
John Muddle, Ph.D.
Vice President, Software Engineering
John is focused on implementing best practices for software development at VIA. He co-invented VIA’s core platform and currently develops, integrates, and quality assurance tests the platform for VIA’s applications.
Before VIA, John was a freelance consultant at the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG), where he focused on updating their Python Library. Prior to this position, he was a technical sales support engineer at NAG in Oxford, where he developed technical marketing material and provided pre-sales assistance. John was awarded the best thesis in gravitation physics in 2016 by the Institute of Physics (IOP). His research focused on developing new numerical methods that capture the physical behavior of fluid interfaces permeated by high magnetic fields while taking into account relativistic effects.
John earned his master’s degree in physics and his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Southampton.