K2 Cyber Security releases new platform protecting hybrid clouds against sophisticated attacks
K2 Cyber Security announced the general availability of its cloud workload security platform, featuring two fundamental innovations that together deliver comprehensive protection for hybrid cloud environments.
K2’s Optimized Control Flow Integrity (CFI) technology ensures an application executes only as designed, enabling an industry first – real-time attack detection with no false positives, regardless of an application’s patch status. Its dynamic, workload identity-based micro-segmentation prevents the lateral movement of threats. As part of its launch, K2 is also announcing it has secured $6 million in seed funding from GreatPoint Ventures and Embark Ventures.
“We were immediately intrigued with K2’s approach to workload protection but were skeptical of its ‘no false positives’ claim until we experienced it firsthand,” said David Wells, Head of Technology for ID90 Travel. “K2 fundamentally improved our defensive posture in our public cloud environment. Its solution is super easy to deploy and manage, provides great visibility into our workloads and, best of all, we no longer waste precious time chasing false alarms.”
“As cyber attackers adopt new, sophisticated methods, enterprises need new approaches to stop them,” said Eric Grosse, former VP Security & Privacy Engineering at Google and K2’s technical advisor. “K2’s innovative use of Control Flow Integrity enforcement to detect and prevent attacks is a huge technical accomplishment. K2’s approach introduces a much needed deterministic method for stopping zero-day exploits and protecting applications.”
Introducing the K2 platform
The K2 platform consists of two modules, each powered by a groundbreaking innovation that fundamentally improves an organization’s ability to secure cloud applications and infrastructure.
K2 Prevent provides real-time attack detection powered by K2’s patent-pending Optimized CFI technology. Unlike signature and behavior-based approaches that require prior knowledge of the exploited vulnerability or attack methodology, Optimized CFI works by enforcing the correct execution of the application. Any attempt to execute a command that violates the software’s control flow is flagged as an attack. Inherently deterministic, Optimized CFI can detect any attack – known or unknown. K2 Prevent doesn’t require source code or any instrumentation of the application to secure it against attacks, and also works with legacy applications.
K2 Segment enforces the correct isolation of workloads, secures data in motion and prevents lateral movement of threats in hybrid cloud environments. It features a unique method for dynamic workload micro-segmentation that assigns strong, unique cryptographic identities to workloads that authenticate each other before permitting any communication. Firewall and segmentation policies that govern workload connectivity are applied based on these identities instead of their static IP addresses. This enables bi-directional enforcement of security policies and correct isolation without the latency and subsequent inaccuracies that occur with monitoring-based approaches to application-level segmentation.
Whether deployed separately or as an integrated platform, K2’s offering prevents cyberattacks in real-time on unpatched software, web applications and workloads running in VMs, containers or on bare metal.
“K2’s approach to securing applications is one of the most innovative ideas we have seen in cybersecurity,” said Ashok Krishnamurthi, Managing Partner, GreatPoint Ventures. “We believe K2’s solution will be the go-to solution for defending cloud workloads in today’s high-risk security environments.”
“Co-founders Pravin Madhani and Jayant Shukla have assembled a world-class team at K2 and brought a game-changing platform to market which is easy for customers to deploy and manage,” added Peter Lee, Managing Partner, Embark Ventures. “K2 clearly understands what their customers need when it comes to preventing sophisticated attacks and we believe the industry will tremendously benefit from this approach.”
“As organizations move to the cloud, workloads and application infrastructure become critical attack surfaces for CISOs to contend with,” said Pravin Madhani, CEO and Co-founder of K2 Cyber Security. “Our deterministic approach substantially lowers the cost of defense – no more false alarms or days spent on forensic analysis. Our approach to segmentation shifts traditional network security controls up to the application layer, providing SOC teams with greater flexibility when protecting and moving applications across hybrid cloud environments. We’re confident our approach to preventing attacks will finally give organizations the upper hand against attackers.”