Cisco reinvents security with "Hypershield"

The solution is based on Cisco's Ethernet switching, silicon and compute portfolio for AI infrastructures. Hypershield was built from the ground up with AI in mind, enabling organizations to improve security far beyond what is possible with humans alone. With this industry-first solution of its kind, Cisco is reshaping the way we utilize and protect AI and other modern workloads. For the first time, this innovation gives defenders a structural advantage over cyber attackers.

The Cisco Hypershield security architecture is based on technologies that were originally developed for hyperscale public clouds. They are now available for companies of all sizes. The solution makes it possible to ensure security wherever it is needed: for every application service in the data center, every Kubernetes cluster in the public cloud, every container and every virtual machine. It can even turn any network connection into a high-performance security enforcement point. This offers completely new security functions not only for clouds, but also for data centers, offices, factory floors or hospitals. The new technology blocks application exploits in minutes and stops lateral movement by attackers.

"Cisco Hypershield is one of the most significant security innovations in our company's history," said Chuck Robbins, Chairman and CEO of Cisco. "With our lead in data and our strengths in security, infrastructure and observability platforms, Cisco is ideally positioned to help our customers harness the power of AI."

 "Cisco Hypershield can provide security wherever it is needed - whether software, servers or, in the future, even in a network switch," says Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager for Security and Collaboration at Cisco. "Simple management is important for distributed systems with hundreds of thousands of points. That's why we need to be orders of magnitude more autonomous, at orders of magnitude lower cost."

The advantages of Hypershield

As a new type of security architecture, Hypershield solves three key challenges in the defense against today's advanced threats:

• Distributed protection against exploits: Attackers are exploiting new vulnerabilities faster than patches are available. According to Cisco Talos Threat Intelligence, almost 100 new vulnerabilities are discovered every day. Hypershield provides protection in minutes by automatically running tests and deploying compensating controls in the distributed structure of enforcement points.
• Autonomous segmentation: As soon as an attacker enters the network, segmentation must stop its lateral movement. Hypershield constantly monitors, reviews and evaluates existing policies to autonomously segment the network.
• Self-qualifying upgrades: Hypershield automates the laborious process of testing and distributing upgrades by using a dual data layer. This entirely new software architecture enables software upgrades and policy changes to be placed in a digital twin. This tests updates with the customer's combination of traffic, policies and features and then applies these updates without downtime.

Cisco Hypershield is part of the Security Cloud, Cisco's unified, AI-driven, cross-domain security platform. The solution is expected to be generally available in August 2024. With Cisco's recent acquisition of Splunk, customers will gain unprecedented visibility into their entire digital footprint for significantly enhanced protection.

"AI technology allows hackers to resolve patches and create exploits - in record time. Cisco tackles an AI-powered problem with an AI solution. Cisco Hypershield aims to tip the scales back in favor of the defenders. The solution shields new vulnerabilities from exploitation in minutes - instead of days, weeks or even months," explains Frank Dickson, Group Vice President, Security & Trust at IDC. "The number of vulnerabilities is constantly increasing and the time it takes for attackers to exploit them on a large scale is getting shorter and shorter. It is therefore clear that patches alone are not enough to keep pace. Tools like Cisco Hypershield are necessary to fend off increasingly clever cyber attackers."

The functionality of Hypershield

Protection with Hypershield takes place on three levels: in the software, in virtual machines and in the network and computing servers and appliances. The same powerful hardware accelerators are used as in high-performance computing and hyperscale public clouds.

Hypershield is based on three important pillars:

• AI-native: Hypershield was developed from the outset as an autonomous and predictive solution and manages itself as soon as it is released. This enables a highly scaled and hyper-distributed approach.
• Cloud-native: Hypershield is based on open source eBPF, the standard mechanism for networking and securing cloud-native workloads in the hyperscale cloud. A few days ago, Cisco acquired Isovalent, the leading provider of eBPF for companies.
• Hyperdistributed: Cisco is transforming network security by embedding advanced security controls into servers and the network fabric itself. Hypershield spans all clouds and uses hardware acceleration such as Data Processing Units (DPU) to analyze and respond to anomalies in application and network behavior. The solution shifts security closer to the workloads that need to be protected.

Together with NVIDIA, Cisco is committed to developing and optimizing AI-native security solutions to protect and scale the data centers of tomorrow. The collaboration between the two companies includes leveraging the NVIDIA Morpheus cybersecurity AI framework to accelerate network anomaly detection and NVIDIA NIM microservices to deliver custom AI security wizards for the enterprise. NVIDIA's converged accelerators combine the power of GPU and DPU (Graphics Processing Unit/Data Processing Unit) computing to support Cisco Hypershield with robust security from the cloud to the edge.

"Organizations across all industries are looking for security that protects them from ever-increasing cyber threats," said Kevin Deierling, Senior Vice President of Networking at NVIDIA. "Together, Cisco and NVIDIA are harnessing the power of AI to deliver a high-performance, secure data center infrastructure that enables organizations to transform their business and benefit customers everywhere."

Source: www.cisco.com