Xen founder Simon Crosby's bid to make us all safer
When Simon Crosby, one of the founders of virtualization pioneer Xen left Citrix a while back, many in the industry could not wait to see what he would do next. When it was announced that his new company was to be called Bromium, everyone assumed it would be cloud/virtualization related. There were high hopes for the company and a lot of speculation about what Bromium would actually do. Today the veil has been lifted a bit as Simon debuted Bromium out of stealth mode at the GigaOm Structure event out in San Fransisco.
Based on the track record of Crosby and his fellow Xen founders, they had no problem raising captial for Bromium. Today they announced an additional investment in the company, $26.5M Series B funding from lead investor Highland Capital Partners, new investor Intel Capital, and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Ignition Ventures However, Simon is not announcing a product from Bromium. They are in a private beta and product is not yet available to the public. What Simon is talking about is the technology behind Bromium. Bromium builds its products on top of what it calls the Bromium MicrosvisorTM. Bromium calls this micro-virtualization.
The Microvisor is 2nd generation virtualization technology. According to the company, it “applies the isolation and security principles of virtualization to tasks running within the operating system – completely hidden from the user. The Microvisor automatically identifies each vulnerable task and instantly isolates it within a micro-VM, which is a lightweight, hardwarebacked isolation container that polices access to all OS services and resources.” What that means is that it is isolating individual tasks within applications to ensure that anything malicious does not infect anything else on your machine including the core OS.
According to Bromium, what this means is:
Bromium enables users to safely access untrusted data, applications, networks and media. Bromium assumes that users will make mistakes, and that end point protection software will be unable to detect advanced malware. It assumes that a micro-VM may be compromised at any time, but guarantees that an attacker cannot gain access to sensitive data or applications, or persist an attack, even on PCs that haven’t been patched. A micro-VM can only access files on a “need to know” basis, and any changes it makes are discarded as soon as the user closes the application, erasing malware and eliminating the need for re-imaging. Persisted files are securely tagged as untrusted, and can only be accessed from an isolated context: a new, untrusted micro-VM.
Some of the security issues that Bromium could address are:
- Blocking Advanced Persistent Threats
- Protection of Sensitive Applications
- Data Loss Prevention
- Secure Desktop Virtualization For Every PC
- PC Configuration & Lifecycle Management
If Simon and team can pull even half of this off using the Microvisor, Bromium wil be a smashing success. I know Simon for some time now and do not doubt that he can make it happen. Bromium is a company to watch. With all of the talk about nothing new in security, here is something new to watch.
