THE CHALLENGE
Modern targeted attacks, such as Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), often use multiple hosts as stepping stones and move laterally across them to gain deeper access to the network to access unauthorized resources or exfiltrate sensitive data. These sophisticated cross-host attacks present significant challenges to existing security mechanisms, leading to devastating breaches for many high-profile organizations. Traditional network-level defenses (e.g., firewalls and network intrusion detection systems) can control traffic between two hosts but lack visibility into activities on intermediate hosts, making it difficult to correlate multiple network flows and detect coordinated cross-host attacks. On the other hand, host-level defenses can track information flows within a single system but have limited visibility into network-wide attack events. In short, existing security solutions fail to provide true end-to-end visibility across multiple hosts and, more importantly, are unable to block cross-host attack traffic in real time.
OUR SOLUTION
P4Control delivers a next-generation approach to enterprise cybersecurity by unifying network and host-level monitoring into a single, real-time enforcement system. Unlike traditional tools that operate in isolation, P4Control leverages programmable network switches and a lightweight host agent to continuously track and control the movement of sensitive information across systems. This enables the system to detect and stop advanced threats (e.g., lateral movement, data exfiltration, and malware propagation) in real time. With category-based security labels and dynamic policy enforcement integrated directly into the network infrastructure, P4Control ensures high performance and scalability without requiring significant changes to existing systems. Policies can be defined using NetCL, a user-friendly policy language that simplifies rule creation and updates, empowering security teams to implement zero-trust protection that evolves with emerging threats.
Figure: Overview of P4Control.
Advantages:
- Achieve Zero-Trust architecture in enterprise networks through advanced security and integrity policies
- Real-time, line-rate enforcement using programmable switches and eBPF
- Comprehensive end-to-end visibility across both network and host layers
- Dynamic, granular policy control via high-level NetCL
- Seamless integration with existing infrastructure and standard hardware
Potential Application:
- Enterprise and data center network protection
- Cloud infrastructure security enforcement
- Telecom and carrier-grade threat prevention
- Critical infrastructure and government network defense
