TrustPipe Rolls Out Marker-Based Security Technology

PRESS RELEASE

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--After two years of testing in real-world deployments and at West Coast Labs, digital security vendor TrustPipe emerged from stealth mode today to introduce its breakthrough, marker-based security technology – offering a superior alternative to signature- and heuristic-based security, and helping to make computers and other devices virtually hack-proof.

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“We are delighted to be offering TrustPipe for Business, which incorporates both the technology itself as well as NCR’s world-class managed services and support”

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Founded by Silicon Valley veterans with deep experience in network security, TrustPipe’s patented approach constitutes a major breakthrough in protecting computing devices from hacking. Relying on markers rather than signatures, the system is able to reliably detect – and block – network-based attacks of all types, including both “zero day” events as well as the endless variants of existing vectors.

“The primary purpose of network security is to keep users safe, and by that metric the security industry has largely failed,” said TrustPipe founder and Chief Scientist Kanen Flowers, who was also the founder of nCircle Network Security, acquired last year by Tripwire. “The cause is certainly not a lack of effort, but rather that the approaches used are conceptually flawed. Actually solving the user’s problem required fundamental rethinking.”

Impressive Performance

TrustPipe’s patented, marker-based security technology has been subjected to rigorous lab and real-world testing for more than two years, during which it has been 100 percent effective: no system protected by TrustPipe has been compromised, and there have been no false positives or false negatives. Equally important, TrustPipe technology has successfully protected against every “zero day” event, including high-visibility ones such as Heartbleed and Shellshock.

In a press release today, Scott Markle, CEO of security specialist West Coast Labs, said, “TrustPipe's network security solution performs at the highest level we have ever observed in evaluating security offerings. Through three rounds of extensive testing over a two-year period, we have been unable to hack into any device protected by it, nor have we encountered any false positives or false negatives.” (The full release is available at http://westcoast.com/trustpipe.)

TrustPipe’s performance is particularly notable given the technology’s small footprint (less than 2MB on-disk, less than 4MB of RAM at runtime) and minimal impact on system throughput and performance.

Michael Locatis, former Assistant Secretary for Cybersecurity and Communications in the US Department of Homeland Security and CIO of the US Department of Energy, who serves as chair of TrustPipe’s advisory board, noted that “enterprise CIOs and CISOs are finding it increasingly difficult to protect their environments and data. TrustPipe offers a highly-effective new approach to cybersecurity for every sector, business size and operating system.”

Global Availability

TrustPipe also announced today a reseller agreement with NCR’s Telecom and Technology business, a global leader in consumer transaction technologies with a presence in 180 countries worldwide (direct and distributors). NCR will distribute, install and manage enterprise implementations of TrustPipe, beginning with TrustXP – a special version of TrustPipe designed to harden and extend the life of the approximately 300 million Windows XP computers still in use around the world. More information about NCR’s implementation service for TrustPipe can be found at www.ncrtrustpipe.com.

“We are delighted to be offering TrustPipe for Business, which incorporates both the technology itself as well as NCR’s world-class managed services and support,” said Sophia Williams, VP and GM of NCR’s Telecom and Technology business. “NCR continuously seeks out innovative solutions for our Telecom clients as well as their enterprise and SMB customers. TrustPipe will be valuable to all of them, first to help extend the useful life of their Windows XP systems, and then to protect the rest of their environment as additional operating system coverage is released.”

The company’s initial products target individual computers, but solutions will be available shortly for servers, networking equipment, mobile devices, and the Internet of Things.

Consumer versions may be found at http://trustpipe.com.

How TrustPipe’s marker-based security technology works

Signature-based systems have long been the preferred way to detect threats, because they are precise and therefore actionable — when they detect Signature A, they can confidently take action to block it. However, they are brittle: if the threat changes slightly they fail because there’s no longer an exact match. As a consequence, signature-based systems require constant updates, creating larger and larger sets of signatures that require growing compute resources — and they are always playing catch-up.

Heuristic models, on the other hand, are less brittle because they deal in probabilities. But that also makes them much less precise, which makes them riskier in terms of taking action when they detect something.

TrustPipe discovered that there are distinctive markers — similar to markers in DNA — that perfectly identify entire classes of threats. TrustPipe’s patented, marker-based approach is every bit as precise as the signature model, but its capabilities go far beyond. It detects and blocks all variants — past and future — of every threat class, without modification. For example, TrustPipe-protected systems were not vulnerable to the widely publicized Heartbleed and Shellshock threats, because while those threats were new to signature-based systems, to TrustPipe they were simply members of an existing class. No “urgent update” was required.

“We’re excited by what the technology has been able to accomplish, but we recognize that this is a marathon, not a sprint,” said Ridgely Evers, cofounder and CEO. “While TrustPipe has performed perfectly so far, we assume that there will be issues in the future, and have designed the system to be able to respond.” The architecture and dynamic nature of the TrustPipe technology will enable it to update all TrustPipe-protected machines and contain the threat, quickly and effectively. In the rare case of a truly new threat class, TrustPipe automatically discovers the new threat, protects the compromised computer in real time, and then shares its discovery with every other TrustPipe in the world, inoculating the entire TrustPipe ecosystem in minutes.

About TrustPipe

TrustPipe was founded in 2011 by a small group of Silicon Valley veterans with the mission of making the Internet safe, and armed with a profound breakthrough in security technology. TrustPipe is funded by its founders and a small group of Silicon Valley and San Francisco investors with backgrounds spanning cybersecurity and large-scale networked systems. More information about TrustPipe and its security solutions can be found at www.trustpipe.com.

Contacts

Grayling for TrustPipe
Will McCormick, 415-442-4023
[email protected]