Provable defense against cyber breaches

It’s a big day for us at Fortanix!  I’m thrilled to announce our Series-A financing of over $8M, to bring Runtime Encryption® to enterprises.

A new approach to cybersecurity!

It’s apparent that existing approaches to securing applications and infrastructure have been ineffective. What’s even more frustrating is that despite the plethora of solutions for detecting and analyzing breaches, there haven’t been any real breakthroughs in preventing data breaches.

There is no law of physics stipulating that data breaches cannot be prevented with 100% certainty. That’s why I teamed up with Anand Kashyap to find Fortanix. At Fortanix, we believe security should meet three criteria:

• Critical infrastructure and applications need security that is provable — that works flawlessly all the time without relying on thresholds-based triggers or alerts.
• Security should be portable — able to follow the applications wherever they run, either in the public cloud or on-premises.
• Lastly, it’s not enough to alert an overworked SOC team that the proverbial horse is about to leave the barn or has just left the barn. Security must be preventative — it must not allow assets to be compromised in the first place.

Background story of Fortanix

 Anand and I have known each other since undergrad. While I designed some of the world’s most advanced hardware and cryptography products at NVIDIA and Cryptography Research, Inc., Anand worked on infrastructure security at Symantec. Between the two of us, we have more than 100 patents and 30 publications in leading journals. Our work has been deployed in billions of products.

Based on our years of experience in security and cryptography, we realized that existing approaches are inadequate to the current threats facing businesses.

And a new data security solution is needed which leverages an understanding of how modern application stacks work all the way from the chip to the cloud.

Fortanix is the result of that understanding. We are thrilled to have the support of Foundation Capital and NeoTribe Ventures — two committed and knowledgeable venture partners.

How we do it — Runtime Encryption®

Today, encryption secures data at rest (e.g., TDE, self-encrypting hard drives) and in motion (e.g., TLS). However, once an application runs, it is vulnerable to a variety of attacks, including malicious insiders, root users, credential compromises, OS zero-day bugs, and network intruders.

Once a privileged account or a key has been compromised, attackers can move laterally and siphon off all the sensitive data.

Fortanix created Runtime Encryption® using Intel® SGX so that applications can process and work with encrypted data without ever exposing plaintext application code or data to the operating system or any other running process.

Fortanix DSM

During our year-long customer survey and research process, we identified a need for securing three different types of assets:

• Keys (including PKI certificates, account credentials, API tokens, etc.) – these are the most sensitive and sought after assets of an enterprise.
• Data — infrastructure applications might consume or generate a variety of sensitive data, including PII, healthcare data, financial data, or critical configuration data.
• Applications — applications may contain proprietary and sensitive code that organizations want to protect from reverse engineering or unauthorized access.

To secure keys, we are announcing the general availability of our beta program for Fortanix DSM using Runtime Encryption® technology.

Fortanix DSM offers HSM-grade security with software-like scalability, flexibility, and effectiveness. Learn more about Fortanix DSM from the Intel-Fortanix joint whitepaper.

Meanwhile, we are also working closely with our design partners to protect data and applications using Runtime Encryption®.

Come work with us!

At Fortanix, we believe that decoupling security from infrastructure will fundamentally change how security is perceived, designed, and delivered. Every day, we work to get closer to this critical goal.

If you’re an engineer or a businessperson who is eager to challenge the status-quo, check out our career page.

If you are a security leader responsible for securing your critical infrastructure, please contact us at info@fortanix.com. We couldn’t be more excited bringing Fortanix to you!