Bromium

History

Bromium was founded in 2010 by Gaurav Banga, who was later joined by former Citrix and XenSource executives Simon Crosby and Ian Pratt. Early employees of the company included Vikram Kapoor, Kiran Bondalapati, Preet Paul, Anushree Pole, Vadim Dmitriev, Andy Southgate, Jacob Gorm Hansen and Gianni Tedesco. The company has raised a total of $75.7 million in three rounds of venture funding. The rounds raised $9.2 million, $26.5 million, and $40 million respectively with venture firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Highland Capital Partners, Intel Capital, and Meritech Capital Partners.

Bromium earned the title of “Cool Vendor” by Gartner, a technology research and advisory company, in 2014. Bromium was named by CNBC in the Disruptor 50 in 2013.

In February 2014, the company published information about bypassing several key defenses in Microsoft's Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) by taking advantage of the inherent weakness of its reliance on known vectors of return-oriented programming (ROP) attack methods.

Technology

Bromium's technology is called micro-virtualization and it protects computers from malicious code execution initiated by the end user, including rogue web links, email attachments and other files. Its proprietary virtualization technology relies on hardware isolation for protection.

It is implemented by a late-load hypervisor called a Microvisor, which is based on the open source Xen hypervisor. The Microvisor is similar in concept to a traditional hypervisor that’s installed on a server or desktop’s operating system. Traditional VMs are full versions of an operating system (complete with full suites of applications), but the Microvisor uses the hardware virtualization present on desktop processors to create micro-VMs which are specialized virtual machines tailored to support a specific task. When a new application is opened, a link is clicked on, or an email attachment is downloaded, the Microvisor creates a micro-VM tailored to that specific task with access to only those resources required to execute. The microvisor enforces the principle of least privilege by isolating all applications and operating system functions within a micro-VM from interacting with any other micro-VM, the protected desktop system, or the network the protected desktop is embedded in.

The architecture specifically relies on Intel VT to guarantee that task-specific mandatory access control (MAC) policies will be executed whenever a micro-VM attempts to access key Windows services. Since Micro-VMs are hardware-isolated from each other and from the protected OS, trusted and untrusted tasks can coexist on a single system with mutual isolation.

The Microvisor’s attack surface is extremely narrow, making it virtually impenetrable by making exploits prohibitively expensive to execute. A report from NSS Labs details penetration testing of the Bromium architecture, which achieved a perfect score in defeating all malware and expert human attempts at penetration.

Products

vSentry 1.0 was available for Windows 7. vSentry requires an Intel processor with VT-x and EPT.

vSentry 2.0 became available in June 2013 and offers protection when users are exchanging documents.

Bromium Live Attack Visualization and Analysis (LAVA) provides the ability to collect attack data detected within a micro-VM for analysis. LAVA provides in-depth forensic capabilities to determine the intent of a malware attack, without risk of exposure, and identifies the vectors, targets and methods of new attacks in real time. It supports Structured Threat Information eXpression (STIX); an emerging XML standard for threat information.