In 2011, Simon Crosby helped found security vendor Bromium, with the promise of enabling what is known in computer science as Byzantine fault tolerance.
In computer science, the Byzantine fault tolerance concept describes a system that is able to survive multiple and arbitrary forms of attack or failure of its component parts. Now five years into Bromium’s life, Crosby remains confident that his company is delivering on its promise.
Bromium isn’t just delivering on its technology promise, it’s also continuing to attract the attention of investors. On March 24, Bromium announced a new $40 million round of funding, bringing total funding to date for the company up to $115 million. Bromium’s investors include Silver Lake Waterman, Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, Highland Capital Partners, Intel Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Meritech Capital Partners.
In a video interview with eWEEK, Crosby details how his company’s technology platforms continues to evolve to help solve the challenge of Byzantine fault tolerance.
“The security industry is full of hype,” Crosby said.
A key element fueling the hype is a very active venture capital market that is aggressively investing in cyber-security vendors. In Crosby’s view, the security industry today is overfunded, and there are too many companies that are just clones of other companies. To that end, there have been vendors that have made claims that are similar to Bromium’s, providing technology that can isolate workloads and limit the risk of any malicious activity from having a broad impact. Crosby emphasizes that even now in 2016, there is no other company that technically does what Bromium offers its customers.
At the core of Bromium’s technology is the concept of the microvisor, which is a Xen hypervisor virtualization-based approach that provides a high degree of isolation. Crosby explained that technically the microvisor is referred to as uXen and is half the size of the mainline upstream Xen open-source technology.
“As of now, five years in, no one has broken what we do,” Crosby said. “That doesn’t mean it’s secure; it’s just means that it’s very expensive to break it.”
Watch the full video interview with Simon Crosby below:
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.