Isolation Is The Future Of Cybersecurity

Kowsik Guruswamy, Chief Technology Officer, Menlo Security

- Zachary Chan

What is this isolation method you’re talking about?

Well, what makes the web experience risky today are these codes, these scripts that are coming in. If you take away all of the scripts, all the interactive elements, the web is almost benign. It’s this interactivity that we’ve added over time, the thing that makes the web so lively, is the very thing that ultimately delivers breaches and infections.

Most of the security products today don’t do justice to keep users safe. So, the concept of isolation is very simple. Instead of playing a game of trying to figure out what is good and what is bad, we assume that everything is bad; we take all these scripts and run them in the cloud.

So, what actually happens?

Say I want to visit Hardwarezone. We put the Menlo cloud in the middle, and when the Menlo cloud receives my request to go to Hardwarezone.com, it basically gives me a brand new browser in the cloud. And it is this browser that ends up going to hardwarezone.com and executes all the scripts with the assumption that everything is bad. When I’m done, and I close this browser in the cloud, everything gets deleted. That browser in the cloud? Also gets deleted. The whole session is completely erased. If there was actually an infection, it doesn’t have a place to linger any more and there is nothing to infect.

Our first breakthrough was being able to do this with millions of users all doing browsing across the internet. Think of the massive scale, having a million browsers in the cloud and managing it all. The second part, which is also super interesting, is that for the user, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. All of the interactivity that you’re used to, the menus, scrolling, videos, everything still works, and feels exactly as before.