UNCLOAK (UNC/UCC)
Website: https://uncloak.io/
Whitepaper: http://whitepaper.uncloak.io/
Lightpaper: https://summary.uncloak.io/
Bounty: https://uncloak.io/bounty/
Telegram: https://t.me/uncloakio
Twitter: https://twitter.com/uncloakio
Next Generation Cyber Security Threat Management
Update as of 05/08/2018
PROJECT SUMMARY
Uncloak means ‘demystify’ or ‘unmask’.
Uncloak is a fully scalable blockchain powered technology that enables businesses to monitor, protect themselves against and eliminate cyber threats, staying one step ahead of the Hacker.
Uncloak is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based analytical tool for the intuitive, automated and seamless performance of security checks: giving users the ability to cut through the cyber jargon and understand, remediate and resolve cyber security issues. In the absence of innovative tools such as Uncloak, successfully evaluating a company’s computers and network infrastructure requires specialised, highly skilled labour, extensive setup time and significant costs.
IDENTIFIED PROBLEMS
Cyber crime damage costs to hit $6 trillion annually by 2021. Cybersecurity spending to exceed $1 trillion from 2017 to 2021.
TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS & KEY FEATURES
Features include:
Next generation cyber security vulnerability scanning system to ensure business remain compliant and aware of security issues. In addition, Uncloak’s database provides a constant real-time cyber threat inventory. Businesses can stay ahead of and eliminate cyber threats themselves, rather than relying on expensive 3rd party services such as those provided by the big four consultancy practices. Key cyber threat vulnerability scanning tools (in development) include:
• On premise software tool: Allow users to scan their internal network for threats and vulnerabilities and report back to the central dashboard.
• Advanced network discovery tool: Cloud environments can be scanned with ability to look for vulnerabilities across public/private/hybrid cloud environments ranging from Microsoft™, AWS™ and Google™.
• Intelligent Security Compliance tool: Innovative engine to check against cyber essentials/PCI DSS/ISO27001 compliance requirements.
• Black hat extreme mode: Conversion of online security database into a number of additional tools that can check for vulnerabilities with multiple operating systems issues ranging from the website, workstation and databases.
Advanced artificial intelligence to check public & hidden internet data for “Zero Hour” cyber threats. The AI technology will allow threats to be exposed and validated. AI will handle the scans millions of records on the public internet and the hidden internet, searching for new and existing vulnerabilities and potential new vulnerabilities or identify the latest cyber threats.
Blockchain powered cyber threat detection solution using ‘bug bounty’, allowing verified IT security experts worldwide to collaborate in resolving cyber threat vulnerabilities and be rewarded through a fully automated system. Through the bug bounty program, security testers are rewarded for identifying new threats, including:
• Vulnerabilities are not allowed to be added to the platform without approval from a pool of verified hunters chosen at random
• End to end visibility of vulnerabilities found and payments to hunters within the Uncloak platform occur automatically without intervention
• Real-time analytics and automated reporting with a locked audit trail of everything
• Tamper-proof vulnerability database
• Securely sharing data with all parties
• Reduce reporting process time and effort for vulnerability checks
• Leaderboard system for all registered hunters/validators with bonus stars given to the most frequent contributors resulting higher in token payouts.
Example of bug hunting validation process
Current ‘Demo’ evaluation:
Uncloak’s solution is not open source. No github is available to review at the moment. Having said that, we registered on their website to access the ‘Uncloak demo’ (prototype). Uncloak has been working on a demo for the past 12 months.
The demo focuses on the vulnerability scanning system as follows:
• Easy to understand dashboard to check progress of scans and reports, request external IT consultancy and set up schedule scanning jobs.
• Automatically identify a client’s public internet footprint covering websites, email servers, applications and computers on the internet in readiness for a security scan greatly reducing the timescales around security scanning setup.
• Black Hat mode: Uncloak Software is able to simulate a live hack attempt against an email server and also check a client’s antivirus protection.
Demo assessment: Due to the nature of the MVP, the source code is not public for security reasons. The dashboard presented in the prototype is jut one component of the end product.
BLOCKCHAIN USAGE
Why use the blockchain? Is there a valid usage for a decentralized solution?
The blockchain technology mainly for the bug bounty program. Any vulnerabilities that have been found within an application by a hunter are immediately checked against an existing public cyber vulnerability database to ensure it is indeed a new cyber threat and not an existing recorded threat. Each hunter has the ability to check another hunter’s vulnerability, taking up to 4 validators (ethical hackers) to check that a vulnerability found is genuine and can be recorded to the blockchain as a real cyber threat. The hunter discovering the vulnerability will be given 10,000 UCC (amount may change) tokens unique to the platform, whilst the hunters who checked the validity of the vulnerability will be given 1500 UCC tokens each, which can be converted on our platform to tradeable UNC tokens which can be exchanged for Ethereum on a public exchange.
Eliminates administration costs when rewarding cyber security testers “hunters”- no human interaction required. The use of the blockchain and smart contract voting rights system greatly reduces the level of manual administration, costs and time required to advertise a new cyber threat via our Uncloak platform.
Ensures that any security vulnerabilities that are found are proved to originate from the Uncloak platform which will increase client confidence
Why use the EOS protocol layer over other blockchain protocols?
EOS is considered a high security blockchain with high speed transaction settlement. EOS uses a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS) consensus mechanism. Typical DPOS blockchains have 100% block producer participation. A transaction can be considered confirmed with 99.9% certainty after an average of 1.5 seconds from time of broadcast.
Blockchain Usability assessment: A blockchain solution makes perfect sense for Uncloak. The bug hunting feature would be more difficult to scale and manage without a decentralized platform regulated by smart contracts.
PROJECT ROADMAP
Q4 2016
Development of CSaaS — “Cyber security as a service” application for customers to perform their own security checks
Q1 2017
Strategic Partnership formed with Adecco, the world’s largest human resources firm to provide cyber security consultancy to public/private sector clients
Q2 2017
Awarded best in class IT consultancy by Wealth and finance magazine
Q4 2017
CSaaS renamed to Uncloak
Q1 2018
Strategic alliance formed with world leading artificial intelligence software developers (Krzana)
Released whitepaper
Building community and strategic relationships.
Q2 2018
Uncloak™ UNC token crowd sale
Development of cyber threat detection AI engine (beta)
Q3 2018
Development of bug bounty alpha based on EOS™
Launch of Uncloak channel partner model
Launch of Bug Bounty community
Q4 2018
• Launch of Uncloak bug bounty alpha on EOS testnet
• Alpha launch of Uncloak AI engine
• Uncloak™ general public platform release
Roadmap assessment: The roadmap seems realistic. Launch of mainnet 6 months post TGE (Q4’18) is quite standard for Dapps. I wish Uncloak would provide more granularity on their roadmap and milestones post mainet launched, for example, how the optimization of the AI engine could potentially lead to new ‘smart’ features within their vulnerability detection tools.
PARTNERSHIPS
Uncloak currently have several high profile partnerships being finalised but as of now cannot be publicly announced.
Partnership assessment: Uncloak currently is in the process of establishing proof of concepts with several interested parties. To provide context, very few Dapps have running partnerships prior to testnet launch. Having said that, we strongly believe in the CEO’s ability to provide a testing ground for Uncloak’s technology with his current business clients such as Adecco and others.
TEAM
Management (3)
Tayo Dada (CEO)
Based in London’s Tech city, Tayo has Over 30 years of experience working in IT from software development to IT management. Tayo manages an award-winning InfoSec team of experts in IT security and Cyber Threat management who are furnished with industry recognised qualifications/certifications including SC clearance, CISSP, ISO27001, Cyber Essentials, CEH and CREST. Actively involved in working with Start-ups and organisations who aim to accelerate their growth through innovative IT Solutions. Industry expert on IT Security with a background in hacking. Help set up Big 4 consultancy’s first ethical hacking division in the UK.
Phil Jackson (CTO)
Industry renowned cyber security expert. Over 22 years of IT security and software development experience working with a myriad of organisations and cyber security applications. Strong understanding of the OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities. Contributing to the security test framework. Writing code to add to the security features within the application. Understanding global security threats and understanding impact on our applications. Ability to demonstrate vulnerabilities and advise teams on best practices to close these down. . Commercially skilled in Java, Spring 3 & 4, VB, VB.NET, C#, C++ and Python and scripting languages JavaScript and VBScript.
Nicholas Topham (COO)
Nicholas has worked at the forefront of the TMT sector for 30 years, operating as a CEO, COO, partner level consultant and Investor. His experience spans the decades from computerisation, through liberalisation, mobile, the Internet, Datacentres, the growth of Asia and Developing markets, the Cloud and Applications and the processes necessary to run a business.
Rest of team (8)
Nick Banks ( Commercial Director)
A senior commercial advisor to innovative technology companies for over thirty years. Building businesses that are sustainable and profitable has been a passion and achievement throughout a long and rewarding career. Successfully taken a number of different innovative technology companies to market globally and driven them to profitability and successful IPO or private sale. Achievements have included starting WatchGuard in Europe prior to a successful IPO, Managing Director of Webroot as it transitioned from a consumer to enterprise focused company, Global VP Sales of IronKey, a brand eventually sold to Kingston Technologies and VP Sales of emerging markets for CyberGuard.
Toby Abel (AI Expert)
Toby is a technology entrepreneur creating product development teams, overseeing tech builds and crafting funding and BI strategies for startups, MVPs, business transformation and exits. Combining AI- driven search and recommendation engines with industry relevant tools and deep linguistic analysis. Working across business sectors including: events, technology, education, recruitment, security, fashion and news. Toby uses outstanding consultancy skills to take world class teams with proven prototypes to a global stage.
Brendan Sturm (Blockchain Developer)
Brendan is an engineer, entrepreneur, and blockchain enthusiast. Brendan’s background is in computer science with experience in Solidity, token development, Dapp development, and Python. Previously, he worked at Capital One where he designed and implemented many fraud defenses.
Dean Jackson (Senior Software Developer)
Dean is an accomplished full-stack developer, one of the original developers of the Uncloak prototype. 15 years of experience working with some of the fastest growing FinTech companies within the UK. Advanced knowledge in private/public cloud infrastructure, PHP, MVC frameworks, REST API, Javascript & Linux OS.
Vincent O’Neill (Senior Advisor)
A security expert with over 30 years experience of security operations across government, intelligence and commercial sectors. Designer and leader of integrated security solutions for the physical and digital domains. Cyber security advisor and business leader for energy security, financial services risk management and global sports events
Claire Mclaughlin (Head of Marketing/Communications)
A commercially astute innovator and strategist with a proven track record of success in driving product development and entry to market. A pioneer of new technology and consumer engagement. Head of Marketing and Content leveraging blockchain technology in partnership with cross-functional teams. Former Global Head of Interactive Technology at the BBC. Key strategist for the UK Women in Technology Network.
Lena Bhogaita (Head of Operations)
An operational specialist in cyber threat analytics and reporting. PMO and product consultant she is responsible for the product launch, communications and business operations of Uncloak. Prior to joining our team, she was Operations Manager for the workplace strategy team at Sky, leading European broadcaster, with +20,000 employees and +23 million subscribers across its media platforms.
Ola Dada (Community Manager)
Actively involved in a number of successful start-ups across EMEA since the emergence of social media. Experienced in facilitating media and business conferences, panels, press and social media. An avid blockchain investor with a deep knowledge of security, governance and privacy technologies. An expert of online strategy for 15,000 users+, identifying key messaging for development teams and b2b and b2c communities. Delivers targeted campaign management with measurable outcomes.
Management Team assessment: CEO is an industry veteran (albeit no big company but start up). Ability to execute successfully on idea is mitigated. CEO is currently running his own IT consulting firm. We understand that he will be stepping down from MITS on successful raise of Uncloak and remain chairman. The rest of the team seems strong in IT consulting but little startup or blockchain experience. Most of the team are currently ‘outsourced’ by being involved in several projects at the same time. Only CEO is listed as full time employee.
Advisors (6)
Hugh Chambers (Advisor)
Hugh is the CEO of The Cyber Authority, headquartered in London. The Cyber Authority specializes in cyber threat detection, mitigation and remediation. Hugh is an accomplished international business pioneer in the development of innovative and progressive companies across a wide range of disciplines. Hugh has been a senior executive in 40 worldwide companies and a Fellow of the Institute of Directors. Career highlights include being one of the key innovators for the international courier industry, then helping to turn Hong Kong Telecom into a $100m/year EBITDA business over the course of just six months. He then went on to establish a telecommunications company for MIM BV that brought in revenues of $80m/year with operations in 23 time zones. Hugh co-founded Interoute, which stands as the largest telecommunications group in Europe today, recently sold to GTT Communications for $2.3 billion cash (March 2018).
Steve Godman (Advisor)
Steve is an experienced, commercially-driven entrepreneur who has has been involved in early-stage, disruptive technology businesses for nearly 20 years, following an early career in global logistics. He has led sales and marketing teams across MarTech, messaging, mobile and social platforms. In 2011 Steve served as Commercial Director of Skinkers, driving their acquisition by IMImobile PLC. He continued to orchestrate the successful merging of the two companies and the sale of their mobile and social media aggregation and curation tool to over 80% of UK media companies including the BBC. In 2014, Steve launched Soundmite, the world’s first social audio service across mobile and web.
Mitchell Scherr (Advisor)
Mitchell Scherr is a Digital Data Pioneer with 23 years’ experience in the IT industry. He is a market driven CEO, successfully leading businesses and helping organisations and governments to protect, find and make sense of their complex data structures. Mitchell has an acute understanding of every aspect of the corporate lifecycle — from product development to marketing and sales strategy to the development of global alliances and joint ventures and domestic and international fund raising initiatives. He has an extensive experience in the USA, UK, Australia and the GCC. Mitchell is an inventor of two US Patents, relating to ‘Relevance Ranked Faceted Meta Data Search’ presently used within product offerings provided by Bloomberg/BNA. He was a key note speaker at several major global industry conferences and interviewed and published by NBC and Fox TV, Wall Street Journal, Internet World and Business 2.0.
Charles Nolan (Advisor)
Charles Nolan is a dynamic individual who specializes in transformation, change and consolidation across a wide range of industries in the Information Technology and Communications field. Charles is adaptable, entrepreneurial and fast acting on assignments delivered to get results. He specializes in execution and delivery within the organisation from Plan through Design, Build & Run. In touch with ever-changing modern technology, Charles can deliver results including the sought after areas of transformation, Operations, Consolidation, Analytics, Cloud Computing and High Density computing. Bringing his international and cultural experience with global organisations, Charles can operate and interact across the globe, and achieve the optimal results within the respective cultural and national environments. Charles’ broad industry experience brings a hybrid vigour to his assignments, and he is a known leader in various industry forums, from Strategy, Governance and Innovation, to Cloud Computing, new Technologies and Education.
Mark Kreitzman (Advisor)
No bio available in latest Whitepaper v1.5 (28.01.18). Linkedin info available.
Sven Radavics (Advisor)
No bio available in latest Whitepaper v1.5 (28.01.18). Linkedin info available.
Advisory team assessment: Advisors are primarily seasoned business veterans in the Tech industry. The quality of the contacts in the technology sector should be enhanced.
Investors
No outside investors mentioned at this stage. Self funded by Managed IT Services.
Investor assessment: No information available.
COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
Competitor Assessment: Several competitors in the cyber security blockchain space. None currently apply artificial intelligence, Uncloak has a first mover advantage in this respect.
BUSINESS MODEL
Marketing Strategy (‘Go to Market’)
Clients are primarily B2B (either SMEs or large companies).
B2B adoption plan: Uncloak plans to leverage of their two partners in the big 5 consultancies, plus access to over 200 resellers through their current business development staff members.
Developers adoption plan: Development of an open API to allow 3rd party applications to manage remote administration/ reporting and configuration of Uncloak.
Revenue Model
Business Model Assessment: The business model presented makes some strategic sense. However, cash flow projections for Uncloak are missing in the information made available to the public.
TOKENOMICS
Token Usability:
Uncloak will issue 2 types of tokens
UNC (ERC 20)
Firstly, the UNC token will be released on the ERC-20 format. UNC serves the purpose of being easily externally tradeable.
UCC (EOS)
Secondly, the UCC token will allow:
Companies will need UCC to access the platform and reward the bug hunters.
Bug hunters will be paid in UCC.
Token Metrics:
Total Token Supply: 4,200,000,000 UNC
Unsold tokens will be burned
Hard Cap: $21,000,000 USD
Soft Cap: $6,000,000 USD
Presale ICO Start: 25 May 2018 8:00 AM GMT
Presale ICO End: 25 June 2018 2:00 PM GMT (or as long as supply lasts)
Main ICO Start: 26 June 2018 8:00 AM GMT
Main ICO End: 3 July 2018 2:00 PM GMT
Private Sale
$200k USD min private sale
40% would be immediately released after end of public sale (ICO). These however will be locked as the project does not see themselves as a pump and dump opportunity. Thus, the Tokens will be locked until an exchange to prevent DEX trading. Uncloak anticipate an exchange listing around June/July and have started dialogue with the bigger exchanges.
40% released before exchange listsing
20% released 3 months after exchange listing
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — -
Presale
Maximum Presale ICO Investment Cap: $100,000 USD
ETH $5000-$25000 20% discount 1 UNC = $0.008
ETH $25000-$49999 25% discount 1 UNC = $0.0075
ETH > $50000 30% discount 1 UNC = $0.007
Token Bonus from 10% to 30% dependent on Token contribution.
$200–499K 20%
$500K-999K 25%
$1M-2M 30% BONUS
Main Sale
Token Price: 1 UNC = $0.01 USD
Minimum ICO Investment: 10,000 UNC tokens equivalent to $100
Maximum ICO Investment: $100,000 USD
Main ICO Bonus 10%
Unlocked on Exchange Listing
Token distribution:
50% Token Sale: UNC token will be offered for sale to be used for the Uncloak platform.
15% Early Backers, Equity Investors & Advisors: Uncloak have early investors and advisors to help with the development of the technology. Part of the equity investments have been converted into tokens.
15% Founding Team (18 months vesting)
10% Retained by Uncloak for Bug Bounty program (clarify bug bounty program in place): The retained tokens will be used for converting between UNC and UCC tokens for hunters and can also be used in additional offerings to further development and staff incentives.
10% Developer Fund: Used to incentivise, reward and attract outside developers to build projects, integrations, partnerships, hackathons and community involvement. Growing the ecosystem is important.
Use of funds:
55% R&D: Use to continuously develop the product, grow the team globally.
20% Sales & Marketing: Grass-roots marketing to start and expand to webinars, conferences,
sponsorships, advertising and PR.
10% Community costs: Initial capital needed to incentivise the community and drive membership for bug bounty.
10% Operations: General overhead and administrative costs for running the business on a
global scale.
5% Legal, Compliance & Accounting.
RISK ASSESSMENT
Competition: Competition emerges for Uncloak-degree data analysis software.
Impact: Medium
Likelihood: Medium
Mitigation approach: 1) Seek patent protection for foreground intellectual property emerging in the project. 2) Develop hard-to-replicate software assets.
Slow Market Adoption: The willingness of customers to adopt Uncloak security software over traditional formats may be slower than expected; e.g. the market for cyber security threat detection is relatively new, rapidly evolving and somewhat unproven.
Impact: Medium
Likelihood: Medium
Mitigation approach: 1) Target sales efforts in domains where early market adoption has already started in IT security firms/IT consultancies, 2) Work with established channel market to to push the adoption of Uncloak.
Technical challenges: Some of the technical approaches in the project to perform dark web/deep web research require algorithms and have never been automatically implemented in IT security applications.
Impact: High
Likelihood: Low
Mitigation approach: 1) Utilise Uncloak/DEV staff with the significant expertise in both IT security applications, Big data processing, and data analysis production. 2) Adopt an Agile approach to include stakeholders in the development cycle to specify software features and use a MoSCoW (Must, Should Could, Would) requirements prioritisation.
Implementation Delays: Software projects can face implementation delays
Mitigation approach: 1) Using the Agile approach, establish software requirements early into the project, and refine software requirements with the development. Avoid the temptation to add features (feature creep) and focus on high priority requirements. 2) Use a professional project task tracking tool like Jira to avoid overloading individuals with tasks. 3) Project management to have monthly reviews of project to ensure the project stays on schedule and meets deadlines.
Risk assessment: The risks are appropriately highlighted and generally speaking mitigated. This, however, depends on a significant number of external factors outside the control of Uncloak.
OVERALL ASSESSMENT
Demo assessment: No access to github. The dashboard presented in the prototype is quite limited. Based on the level of transparency. We care currently unable to provide an opinion on the technical functionalities developed to date. Uncloak has indicated that this is just a sample of what is to come. The Demo available is just a small component of the end product which will be developed on in the coming months. We are confident that they have the industry experience to deliver.
Blockchain Usability assessment: A blockchain solution makes perfect sense for Uncloak. The bug hunting feature would be more difficult to scale and manage without a decentralized platform regulated by smart contracts.
Roadmap assessment: The roadmap seems realistic. Launch of mainnet 6 months post ICO (Q4’18) is quite standard for Dapps. I wish Uncloak would provide more granularity on their roadmap and milestones post mainet launched, for example, how the optimization of the AI engine could potentially lead to new ‘smart’ features within their vulnerability detection tools.
Partnership assessment: Uncloak currently is in the process of establishing proof of concepts with several interested parties. To provide context, very few Dapps have running partnerships prior to testnet launch. Having said that, we strongly believe in the CEO’s ability to provide a testing ground for Uncloak’s technology with his current business clients such as Adecco and others.
Management Team assessment: CEO is an industry veteran (albeit no big company but start up). Ability to execute successfully on idea is mitigated. CEO is currently running his own IT consulting firm. We understand that he will be stepping down from MITS on successful raise of Uncloak and remain chairman. The rest of the team seems strong in IT consulting but little startup or blockchain experience. Most of the team are currently ‘outsourced’ by being involved in several projects at the same time. Only CEO is listed as full time employee.
Advisory team assessment: Advisors are primarily seasoned business veterans in the Tech industry. The quality of the contacts in the technology sector should be enhanced.
Investor assessment: No information available.
Competitor Assessment: Several competitors in the cyber security blockchain space. None currently apply artificial intelligence. Uncloak does not have a first mover advantedge.
Business Model Assessment: The business model presented makes some strategic sense. However, cash flow projections for Uncloak are missing in the information made available to the public.
Tokenomics assessment: Token usability makes sense. Token usage and token use of funds are market standard. Having said that, the token metrics could be improved, especially ETH peg relative to lock up associated with presale level.
Risk assessment: The risks are appropriately highlighted and generally speaking mitigated. This, however, depends on a significant number of external factors outside the control of Uncloak.
Pros
Cons
VERDICT
Uncloak is a compelling opportunity in the cyber security threat detection space due to the addition of artificial intelligence. The CEO is experienced and has strong advisors around him. At this stage, we are optimistic that the team’s all star composition will provide uncloak with a successful business model which is a key metric for investment. The partnerships being confirmed in the next week should push Uncloak into one of the best ICO’s we have reviewed to date which is under the radar. Uncloak has just begun to push out media and marketing for community growth, over the next few weeks we predict that their community metrics will increase.
Short term: GOOD
Long term: GOOD
BUSINESS 8/10
TEAM 9/10
TECH NO RATING
TOKENOMICS 8/10
COMMUNITY 7/10
PARTNERSHIPS 9/10 (TO BE CONFIRMED)
OVERALL PROJECT RATING 82%