Johannesburg, 02 Jul 2009
Symantec Research Labs is bullish on driving its next-generation security technologies in order to get a head-start on cyber criminals.
The Symantec Cloud Computing Innovations Showcase, held last week at the Hospital Club, in London, gave a behind-the-scenes look at what the security giant's research labs are doing in the cloud computing arena.
Marc Dacier, director for Symantec Research Labs Europe, provided demonstrations of Symantec's DeepClean project, a hardware sensor, which detects malware through a reputation-based security model. He also revealed how the company is using virtualisation to prevent cyber criminals from exploiting IT systems.
Virtualising security
Dacier says: “When people think about virtualisation, they think about data centre consultation, and it comes down to the notion of virtualisation splitting a single physical machine into several virtual machines. Virtualisation-based endpoint security (VIBEs) splits one physical machine into three different virtual security levels.”
The user can perform operations, while the different security levels can automatically switch between virtual machines and remain transparent and seamless to the user. The technology can work on either Linux machines or Microsoft Windows.
When the user moves into the secure socket layer protocol, used for banking Web sites, VIBEs immediately goes into a lock-down and puts the user into a trusted virtual environment where security is highly restricted and not even software can be downloaded at the time.
When the user accesses mistrusted applications on the Internet or opens e-mail attachments, VIBEs automatically switches into the playground mode where mistrusted software can be run. Lastly, VIBEs has a virtual user mode for regular day-to-day Web browsing.
Dacier points out that Symantec Research Labs is testing the technology and could not specify the exact date when the technology would be released to the public. However, he notes that Symantec will probably decide to roll the technology out as part of one of its Norton consumer products.
According to Dacier, the technology is power-intensive, because it's handling three operating environment and, at this stage, is not well-suited for netbooks. He predicts this will eventually change as netbooks become more powerful in the near-future.
Dacier says VIBEs will go mobile in the not too distant future. He foresees the technology being rolled out to smartphones where the phone will have a personal virtualised environment and a business virtual environment on another operating system, but built onto one device. This will enable business information to remain separate from personal information.
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