See the future, build the future, be the future

I'm back from RSA, and boy am I tired. But, there's no better and faster way to keep tabs on what's happening in information security than to attend this zoo of a conference. I was pleased to see that SSL VPN (using secure sockets layer to build a browser-based virtual private network) is now a big mainstream market, with most security vendors, from Cisco to Juniper to Checkpoint, offering a product in that space. When we came up with the idea, everyone thought we were nuts!

After walking the expo (boy do my feet hurt), going booth to booth from the tiny startups to the huge public companies (VeriSign had their own espresso lounge), I'm increasingly confident that at Robot Genius we've also seen and built part of the future. Whether we'll BE part of the future depends on luck and business factors beyond my control.

There's no doubt in my mind that next-generation desktop security suites will incorporate new capabilities like those of our Spyberus client: they will have deep operating system behavioral monitoring, create process sandboxes, and store enough file-system and OS data to reverse infections and installations.

I am also sure that next-generation search will incorporate security-related data in their results and rankings. Our crawler farm has downloaded and tested all the Windows executables on the internet -- about a million unique applications (terabytes of data, all in storage now!) ranging from screensavers, to games, to complex applications -- and has determined which ones are dangerous malware or malware vectors. The only question is how this data will be used to protect individual users -- it can be used to improve/filter search results, in any firewall or gateway appliance, or even upstream at the network level. One major ISP we met with has already built the infrastructure to block user connects to dangerous urls.