Comment by ig1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ig1 | Hacker News Reader

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CISO budgets are exploding at large companies; in '98 most of these companies didn't even have a CISO.

Firewalls have proven to be ineffective and companies are willing to pay for solutions that are more effective. Attackers have also gotten a lot more professional and sophisticated.

There's certainly been plenty of billion dollar security companies been built outside of the firewall space in recent years (FireEye, Varonis, Lifelock, Trusteer, Cloudflare, etc) and there's undoubtedly going to be many more.

Security also has played out in mobile the way you suggested can't happen. Companies like Lookout and BYOD management companies are well on the way to building billion dollar businesses in spaces traditionally controlled by entrenched vendors enabled by the shift to mobile.

(incidentally the security section was written by Scott Weiss who founded IronPort and later ran Cisco's Security Technology Group; so not someone unfamiliar with the security space)

FireEye is the firm I alluded to in my comment.

Varonis, Lifelock, Trusteer, and Cloudflare aren't reactions to deperimeterization and the declining effectiveness of firewalls. (Ironically, Cloudflare is if anything a cause of the declining effectiveness of firewalls, not a solution). Also: my argument isn't that it's impossible to build a billion dollar security company! It's that the dynamics of doing so aren't isomorphic to those of other startups.

I think you missed the point of my comparison to mobile, which was not that there wouldn't be viable mobile security products, but rather than shifts in technology produce explosive returns for things like adtech and video, but tend not to do that for security. Lookout is I think the closest you come to an example of a breakout success for security, amidst the most important shift in computing since the personal computer, one that has minted a bigger number of larger successes outside security.

The STG has been beating the drum on post-firewall broad-scale deployment of security technology (= more blue pizza boxes) since Jayshree Ulal started it a decade ago. Have you read a lot of Jericho Forum stuff? If you found Weiss' piece interesting, I think you'd find Jericho especially interesting. Maybe even lucrative. ;)

(Voted you back up)

What do you think of software like Bromium, Qubes, etc. which creates enclaves within endpoints?

Very cool and very difficult to operationalize. If I was a VC, I would (cruelly) sum them up as "features of Citrix". Also, if you want to sell an enterprise security team a security product, saying that it reduces the need for stuff like Citrix would be a pretty good pitch.

I've worked implementing both, and Bromium is basically as good of a solution to this problem as you're going to get, in the sense that it requires the least modification of user behavior (the user's Windows machine mostly behaves like a normal one).

Even Bromium was pretty upfront about the use case for their product though (high-value targets like executives who travel to China). They were very honest about it being overkill for an entire enterprise.

I think securing endpoints is basically a lost cause though (I'm happy to consider that a minority opinion however). My company spent many years trying to get TPM's to be the solution to this problem, and I'm pretty sure that ship has now sailed; with the only 2 sectors of the industry that are continuing to grow being completely unsuited to TPMs (virtualization and mobile).

I think we'll eventually realize that much like networks, devices have to assumed to be untrustworthy, and we have to route accordingly.

> the only 2 sectors of the industry that are continuing to grow being completely unsuited to TPMs (virtualization and mobile)

A counterpoint is that mobile platforms often have some form of secure enclave, but sadly not standardized. Even AMD's low cost x86 CPUs are adding an ARM coprocessor, which could in theory be used for functionality similar to TPM, DRM, or AMT. Some of those are more useful than others. On the Intel side, SGX will add more enclave options, and complexity, but hopefully will be open and well documented.

Secure enclaves are very useful tools for OS design, but that's not the kind of security we're talking about here. Enterprises can't easily exploit processor protected VMs and address spaces to, say, prevent PII from leaking. By and large, companies aren't losing data to VMWare jailbreaks; they're losing it to much, much more prosaic attacks.

If every endpoint could support at least two isolated enclaves, it would be feasible for enterprises to isolate some high-value info assets to an internal VPN that is isolated to one of the enclaves, with the other exposed to risky public channels and attacks.

I take issue with "often", as the vast majority of mobile phones don't have anything (even if there exist specific models which could have them).

There was a brief window in time when you had to go out of your way to buy an Intel laptop "without" a TPM (even Macs had them for a time, even if Apple never made use of them). The Trusted Computing Group failed to capitalize on that timeframe by providing both a "reason" and decent solutions to that problem.

There's a lot of reasons why that was, if I've been drinking I'd happily go into many of them.

On the mobile side, I agree, it's a hodgepodge. Apple has their secure enclave (which doesn't quite act like a TPM, even though it theoretically could), and there exist vendors who could theoretically include a TEE in their phones (right now they're almost entirely limited to special "government-specific" use cases).

And I'm ignoring Samsung's solution (which is basically snake oil).

Intel's SGX would be great, provided that the industry suddenly switches to X86 for mobile (which I don't think is going to happen).

The mobile industry is way too fragmented from a hardware perspective for any type of trusted computing platform to achieve even a modicum of install base. That might change in the future, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Intel is slowly inching their way onto smaller devices (compute stick, 7" fanless tablets with TPM & TXT). While Google's Project Ara may look like a lab experiment, the Panasonic FZ-M1 is shipping with multiple peripheral "modules", so there's at least one proof point for modular devices with a radio.

If modular mobile architectures succeed, there will be a better chance of combining one's preferred hardware TCB with one's preferred sensors. Sometimes, it only takes one counterexample to move entire markets, look at the time interval between the first Galaxy Note and Apple iPhone 6.

Varonis and Trusteer essentially deal with the issue of "the bad guys are already inside" and Lifelock the damage control element of post-compromise.

I'd say in mobile security space Good Techonologies, OpenPeak, Ionic, Telesign and Okta all probably have valuations in the mid-hundreds of million of dollars.

The big winners in mobile have been gaming and advertising, but I'd suspect that in terms of enterprise software security companies are probably out-performing the average.

Which of Trusteer's product lines tapped a market opportunity that wasn't already addressed by RSA or Symantec in 2003? If the answer is "most of their revenue came from products that refined value propositions that RSA and Symantec already had products for", then what does Trusteer have to do with Weiss' investment thesis?

In '96 or so, I went to my first Internet security conference. The attendees were a motley crew - junior programmers like myself, schoolteachers, old-school sysops, etc. Lots of us worked for companies that wanted unfettered access to this new Internet thing, but it had to be absolutely secure - and of course, it can't cost anything! There was hardly such thing as a network security professional then.

Things have changed a lot.

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