Defense Industrial Base: CUI protection that survives assessment
CMMC 2.0 turned CUI protection from self-attestation into third-party assessment, and for tens of thousands of contractors, certification now gates contract eligibility. The gap findings cluster in the same place: key management and encryption adequacy. Meanwhile the threat is not hypothetical — actors including Volt Typhoon and APT41 are explicitly attributed to targeting the defense industrial base, and stolen technical data has appeared in foreign military programs within years of the theft. A contractor's S3 bucket of technical data packages, protected by a KMS whose credentials are one phish away, is both an assessment finding and a national security exposure.
CUI stored through HyperSphere DNA™ (Data Neutralization Appliance) sits behind no key store and no vault: encrypted frames are replicated identically across storage backends, and any single backend holds only ciphertext — cryptographically useless without the keys, which are never stored alongside the data. Its cryptographically tamper-evident, append-only audit log — every event HMAC-chained — generates records that can support continuous-monitoring and assessment workflows and integrates with the customer's chosen SIEM and evidence-retention systems. For primes, the flow-down conversation changes too — a subcontractor's or supplier's compromised storage credential cannot produce readable CUI, which constrains the supply-chain blast radius that IAM scoping alone can't.
The dominant breach pattern in the DIB is the same as everywhere else: valid credentials, legitimate access paths, bulk exfiltration. What differs is the consequence — exfiltrated weapons specifications and technical data don't have a settlement figure or a recovery timeline.
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Compliance & frameworks. HyperSphere DNA uses NIST-standardized cryptographic algorithms and a FIPS-aligned cryptographic architecture. It supports selected CMMC Level 2 and NIST SP 800-171 security requirements, and supports data-protection and access-control architectures for organizations handling export-controlled information. HyperSphere provides technical capabilities that support a customer's implementation of applicable security and compliance requirements. Compliance, certification, authorization, and breach determinations depend on the customer's complete environment, configuration, policies, operations, and assessment scope.