Aviva Zacks
Vlad Kostanda, CEO of Adoriasoft, told Aviva Zacks of Safety Detective how much he and his team adore software.
Safety Detective: What does your company do?
Vlad Kostanda: We have been developing software that is related to security for around 10 years. Those are different encrypted solutions, real-time voice communication with advanced encryption, and different kinds of cryptography software. We are not directly in penetration testing or network security space, but we do produce software as a service for our clients that protects their data and their identity using encryption, digital signature, and more advanced cryptography protocols like zero-knowledge. This is one way we are connected to cybersecurity.
Another way is distributed applications in the blockchain and distributed ledger space where security is very important because when we speak about tokenized digital assets, the power of these technologies is so high but at the same time very risky. A bug in a smart contract can allow someone to completely rewrite this data and asset ownership.
These technologies are coming into reality, and we cannot stop this progress. At the same time, a lot of security issues are potentially possible. It’s not like before when we had the potential risk of stolen data from your personal computer or money from a bank account. With these technologies, any registry can be rewritten because of a bug.
We are developing and providing security audits of such smart contracts. It’s how we are related to cybersecurity in this space. So we create these so-called distributed applications, and we can also review smart contracts developed by third parties and make recommendations on how to improve them and minimize the risk of such issues.
SD: Can you tell me what your company name means?
VK: Adoriasoft was invented as a combination of some Greek words, but the word “adorable” and its root is present in English too. We adore software, that’s why it’s Adoriasoft.
SD: Who are your clients?
VK: Mostly, our clients are deep tech companies, startups, and mid-sized. Some of them come for our expertise as we’re covering core R&D for a few ledgers in the blockchain field. Others work with us because we’re quite familiar with building Distributed Apps for various industries/applications. In these cases, we deliver the entire development cycle, including user-facing components and backends.
Also, we have some experience with larger companies that could be identified as enterprises. There was, for example, a project DropSend. It’s similar to Dropbox and was launched even earlier. For this product, we developed a backend that was secure enough to store a lot of personal data.
Now we have some initiatives with Web3 Foundation related to the Polkadot project.
SD: What are the worst cyberthreats out there?
VK: The worst cyberthreats, at least in our domain, are vulnerabilities in DeFi protocols that can compromise any digital asset. And also personal data storage like for example centralized exchanges that store a lot of personal data about their users accumulated through KYC process is the second target for hackers to steal, and this is something that should be also addressed through different approaches. What is more promising and innovative is switching to distributed exchanges (DEX) when the backend isn’t storing all the users’ data and their assets at all. DEX is the future and is the way to protect against such attacks on exchanges.
SD: How do you see cyber developing as we live through the pandemic?
VK: A lot of new products that are related to digitizing and making our lives more remote are now launching, and this is a positive impact. Of course, we still have a lot of unresolved issues related to KYC and identity management performed completely remotely for banks and other innovative financial institutions. These innovations are great but it’s also a serious task to solve because, for example, deep fake technologies based on deep learning and so-called generative adversarial networks allow the production of high-quality photo and video content that is indistinguishable from the real human and the real video. The world is becoming more and more distributed and operations performed remotely face this digital identity issue that has to be solved.
However, the positive impact is still great because people are now learning how to do their tasks remotely more and more. And this also saves a lot of time because for example going to the office every day is time-consuming. Some of our engineers were practicing work from home even long before the pandemic. We have been prepared for this remote type of work for a long time.
