Web Site: www.mocana.com
Headquarters: San Francisco, CA
Year Founded: 2004
Founder: Adrian Turner, CEO
Investors: Southern Cross Venture Partners, Shasta Ventures
Total Capital Raised: $12.1 million
Employees: 30
Company News: www.mocana.com/press.html
By Adrian Turner, Founder and CEO
Mocana is a security software company that delivers comprehensive protection for any embedded device or “thing” connected to the network. This includes smartphones, PDAs, routers, switches, printers or VoIP phones, but also more everyday items like automobiles, home appliances, cash registers, power meters and HVAC equipment. These “attached devices” are quickly outnumbering PCs. Forrester Research predicts that there will be more than 14 billion devices on the net by 2010—and that 95 percent of these devices will be something other than a PC.
Product Line
Mocana offers its Device Security Framework (DSF) to deliver comprehensive protection for any device connected to any network, wired or wireless. The Device Security Framework is made up of over a dozen separate Mocana product offerings that reside at different places on the device, network, or application stack to provide comprehensive device security and management. Some of the DSF offerings are NanoSSL, NanoSSH, NanoUpdate, NanoBoot, NanoRadius and NanoSec. Mocana’s DSF is designed for device manufacturers and service providers and includes design processes and software that are embedded into devices during the manufacturing process. All components of the Device Security Framework feature an asynchronous event driven architecture, very high performance and very small memory footprint specifically designed for the special challenges that embedded device security engineers face.
The newest addition to the Device Security Framework is NanoDefender, an embedded Intrusion Prevention System technology that secures all aspects of a device: communications, identity, access, privilege, control and execution. The new product, now being offered to device manufactures, enables product engineers to create a rules base of acceptable behavior for any applications running on the new device. If an application begins behaving erratically due to malware or some other security threat, NanoDefender terminates the application so that the malware can’t spread across the network or impact the functioning of the device.
It’s clear that the existing “signature-based” model of detecting and eliminating viruses and malware can’t work forever—and it can’t work at all in the device environment. That’s because there’s just too much bad stuff out there. With millions of malware signatures required inside any antivirus product today—and 3,000 new viruses and malware signatures being added every hour of every day—there’s just no way an attached device would be able to keep updated or dedicate the processing power needed to screen all traffic against all virus signatures. By turning the current “virus signature” security model on its head, NanoDefender monitors behavior against a rules base of acceptable actions, and thereby frees up administrators from having to monitor this rapidly-expanding army of viruses, trojans, worms and other malware at all. It also provides a broader net for catching future Internet-based threats, since it does not rely on specific signature-based fixes.
The “Internet of Things”
The rate at which mobile devices are proliferating is staggering. In fact, there are predictions that the number of devices on the Internet could reach far into the billions in the next three years. According to a white paper by Harbor Research, there are approximately 2.8 billion mobile phones in use today, with 1.6 million new ones added daily. Whether you call this phenomenon “the network of devices” or the “Internet of things,” the underlying message is the same: connectivity permeates our society. Nearly everything in our day-to-day lives—from TVs and cell phones to cars, medical devices, networking equipment, thermostats, industrial sensors, aircraft and home appliances, and everything in between, connects (or will soon connect) to the network to operate.
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By Matt Steinfort, CEO