Elemental: Leveraging Virtualization Technology For More Resilient & Survivable Systems
Yesterday saw the successful launch of Bromium at Gigamon’s Structure conference in San Francisco.
I was privileged to spend some stage time with Stacey Higginbotham and Simon Crosby (co-founder, CTO, mentor and good friend) on stage after Simon’s big reveal of Bromium‘s operating model and technology approach.
While product specifics weren’t disclosed, we spent some time chatting about Bromium’s approach to solving a particularly tough set of security challenges with a focus on realistic outcomes given the advanced adversaries and attack methodologies in use today.
At the heart of our discussion* was the notion that in many cases one cannot detect let alone prevent specific types of attacks and this requires a new way of containing the impact of exploiting vulnerabilities (known or otherwise) that are as much targeting the human factor as they are weaknesses in underlying operating systems and application technologies.
I think Kurt Marko did a good job summarizing Bromium in his article here, so if you’re interested in learning more check it out. I can tell you that as a technology advisor to Bromium and someone who is using the technology preview, it lives up to the hype and gives me hope that we’ll see even more novel approaches of usable security leveraging technology like this. More will be revealed as time goes on.
That said, with productization details purposely left vague, Bromium’s leveraged implementation of Intel’s VT technology and its “microvisor” approach brought about comments yesterday from many folks that reminded them of what they called “similar approaches” (however right/wrong they may be) to use virtualization technology and/or “sandboxing” to provide more “secure” systems. I recall the following in passing conversation yesterday:
- Determina (VMware acquired)
- Green Borders (Google acquired)
- Trusteer
- Invincea
- DeepSafe (Intel/McAfee)
- Intel TXT w/MLE & hypervisors
- “Self Cleansing Intrusion Tolerance (SCIT)“
- PrivateCore (Newly launched by Oded Horovitz)
- etc…
I don’t think Simon would argue that the underlying approach of utilizing virtualization for security (even for an “endpoint” application) is new, but the approach toward making it invisible and transparent from a user experience perspective certainly is. Operational simplicity and not making security the user’s problem is a beautiful thing.
Here is a video of Simon and my session “Secure Everything.”
What’s truly of interest to me — and based on what Simon said yesterday — the application of this approach could be just at home in a “server,” cloud or mobile application as it is on a classical desktop environment. There are certainly dependencies (such as VT) today, but the notion that we can leverage virtualization for better resilience, survivability and assurance for more “trustworthy” systems is exciting.
I for one am very excited to see how we’re progressing from “bolt on” to more integrated approaches in our security models. This will bear fruit as we become more platform and application-centric in our approach to security, allowing us to leverage fundamentally “elemental” security components to allow for more meaningfully trustworthy computing.
/Hoff
* The range of topics was rather hysterical; from the Byzantine General’s problem to K/T Boundary extinction-class events to the Mexican/U.S. border fence, it was chock full of analogs 😉
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