Virsec Trusted Execution™ Protects Existing Applications Without Changing Application Code, Patching Operating Systems, Updating Microcode or Incurring Significant Performance Degradation
San Jose, Calif. – April 12, 2018 – Virsec, a cybersecurity company delivering a radically new approach to protect against advanced attacks, today announced that it has extended its cybersecurity platform to protect applications from the processor-level vulnerabilities exposed by Spectre and Meltdown. The solution will be demonstrated live at next week’s RSA Conference in San Francisco.
The Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities came to light in January 2018, from multiple independent security researchers. These exploits take advantage of long-standing security gaps in the World’s most widely used processors from Intel, AMD and ARM. These devices have used a performance enhancing technique known as speculative execution for over 20 years, to reduce delays associated with conditional execution of application code. Speculative execution techniques have been found to take security shortcuts that subvert isolation between security domains and can expose sensitive information via side-channel attacks.
Virsec Trusted Execution™ technology is unique in closely examining memory usage in applications to detect and stop advanced fileless attacks, such as WannaCry, NotPetya and many others. Because Virsec monitors traffic between applications and process memory it is uniquely situated and able to extend protection against microcode attacks such as Spectre and Meltdown.
The solution detects vulnerable code and proactively fences instructions to prevent side-channel exposure caused by speculative execution. Unlike other solutions that use static analysis to find vulnerable code and then require re-writes, Virsec both detects and protects code as is, in real-time. Because this is done selectively, it has negligible impact on overall performance.
“Spectre and Meltdown present huge challenges across the industry, and the solutions offered to date have required unacceptable trade-offs – recompiling code, risky microcode updates, massive hardware upgrades, and huge performance hits” said Atiq Raza, CEO of Virsec. “Our approach is different. We assume that environments are flawed so we rigorously protect applications in real-time from the most advanced threats. Effective security needs to protect applications as they are, and not depend on future upgrades or wishful thinking.”
While some analysts have viewed these threats as being theoretical, researches at Virsec and elsewhere have reproduced powerful versions of Spectre and Meltdown. In fact, Virsec will be demonstrating this live at RSA in an isolated environment, along with its solution for real-time protection.
Virsec will be presenting this and solutions for a wide range of advanced attacks at the RSA Conference 2018, booth 1509 (South Hall) in San Francisco’s Moscone Center, April 16-19, 2018.
About Virsec
Based in San Jose, California, Virsec was founded on the belief that a new model is required to counter today’s advanced cyber threats. The company is led by industry veterans who have driven one of the world’s top processor teams, and created innovative technology in network security, embedded systems and real-time memory systems. The team has broad leadership experience at companies including AMD, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Juniper, Dell, NextGen, BMC Software, ForcePoint, as well a long list of high-growth start-ups. More information and demos are available at www.virsec.com.
