Acalvio awarded seminal U.S. Patent that makes Deception Technology practical and cost-effective to deploy

Innovation allows for a first of its kind Projection of Deceptions – making Deception technology safe, easy and cost-effective

Santa Clara, CA – Oct 1, 2019 – Acalvio Technologies, the leader in Cloud and Autonomous deception, announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued U.S. Patent No. 20,170,310,706, titled “Tunneling For Network Deceptions.” This invention enables a paradigm shift in Deception Deployments: from traditional in-line placement of deceptions to safer, automated and agile projections of deceptions. Acalvio’s Autonomous Deception solution, ShadowPlex, leverages this innovation to engineer Deception Farms “at Enterprise Scale”. The resultant Deception fabric is unmatched it its ease of use, scale and cost-effectiveness, while maintaining the highest levels of detection efficacy.

Acalvio has been leading the market with innovations that make Deception technology easy to use and deploy at enterprise scale. Acalvio was the recipient of the 2018 RSA SandBox Innovation Finalist Award and 2019 SINET innovation finalist award.

“Acalvio’s mission is to bring Advanced Defense to Enterprise and IoT environments across all types of IT operating environments, whether they’re on-premise, private cloud or public cloud platforms,” said Ram Varadarajan, co-Founder and CEO at Acalvio. “Deception is attractive because of its inherent low false positive rates, allowing security teams to focus their efforts on actual threats. With this innovation we have truly ‘industrialized’ the use of Deception technology, bringing radical improvements to both deployment efficiency and detection efficacy.”

While Deception technologies have the unique capability to deliver high quality alerts (low false positives), Deception solutions have been saddled with deployment and safety challenges. This makes deploying deception to distributed networks, remote offices and branch offices, and cloud workloads expensive and cumbersome. In-line brute force deception solutions also create an inadvertent security exposure – because these decoys can be taken over by zero-day attacks that then turn Decoys into assets for the threat actor. Consequently, Deception solutions have had limited success in Enterprise-scale deployments. Acalvio’s innovation, “Tunneling for Network Deceptions”, addresses these challenges and provides the basis for Autonomous Deception.

“After deploying ShadowPlex, we could see immediate benefits in the decoy and deception technology Acalvio brings to the table. Not only was the product extremely easy to deploy, we immediately recognized the value and began expanding our ShadowPlex coverage which helped us detect lateral movement of any threats,” remarked Sean Oldham, CISO at Broadcom. “Huge credit goes to the patented innovations from Acalvio that makes all this possible.”

“The value of Deception technology to detect and respond to Advanced Threats has been well documented, however, its benefits were largely out of reach for most IT and OT enterprises. Acalvio’s innovations have changed that – they have made Deception practical and affordable at scale without sacrificing any of the efficacy,” said Dr. Eugene Spafford, Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University and founder and executive director emeritus of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS), co-inventor of TripWire. “All good innovations are obvious in hindsight – Acalvio’s seminal innovation of ‘network tunneling’ to allow for decoys to be projected from afar is a very clever way to leverage the potential of Deception with no disruption.”

As an innovator in deception-based security, Acalvio has built significant intellectual property related to deploying and managing enterprise-scale security. The company has been granted 25 patents so far, with 15+ pending. The patents range across new deception methods, using software-defined networking (SDN), applying artificial intelligence (AI), and new approaches to threat analysis based on attack artifacts. These innovations translate to tangible and measurable benefits in terms of (1) Early Detection – Reducing “dwell time” (2) Accurate Detection – Low “false positives” and (3) Cost Effective Detection – Low CapEx, Low OpEx, MSSP-ready, Carrier/Service Provider-ready Deception platform, etc. Thereby, ShadowPlex leverages these patents to provide a vastly differentiated and leading-edge deception solution.