An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief
If a generally available Linux OS is a plain donut, Polyverse CEO Alex Gounares and his team are churning out millions of randomly frosted and sprinkled donuts for developers to download each morning. These ‘Polymorphic Linux’ systems function the same as the general distribution as far as the software instructions and environment are concerned, but no two are alike.
Unless you are a cybersecurity expert you don’t know this, but 80% of modern-day system hacks work through free Darkweb tools, using methods known as ‘ROP’ or Return-Oriented Programming, which can snoop and exploit standard memory and kernel-level functions. These attacks can take over homogeneous systems and turn them into fully permissioned attackers. By randomizing math functions so there are billions of different memory-level permutations, Polyverse’s snowflake Polymorphic Linux boxes can easily avoid any commonly known exploit, even after a new patch install.
“We can’t help you if you give away your password,” says Gounares. “However, an attacker expects the vulnerability to appear in the same place in memory, and these chip instructions change. There are quadrillions of different permutations we can create at the memory level while the system remains semantically the same.”
The company is planning to release a polymorphic Windows OS version in early 2019.
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