On October 9th, we participated in the DemoCamp Halifax event at Volta, an event for the regional technology and startup community to come together and demo what they’ve been working on.
There were a total of 6 companies demoing their products, ranging from early beta prototypes, products launching, and those that have been in-market for a short while.
The event was a perfect use case for the μGateway- connecting to the event’s Wi-Fi, an untrusted network, with many other untrusted devices also connected.
People routinely connect to untrusted Wi-Fi networks. This exposes their devices, leaving them vulnerable to attacks. Not even a VPN can protect them.
The μGateway protects against exploits, scanning/sniffing, DDoS attacks, and eavesdropping. Through encrypted DNS queries, the μGateway also prevented attackers from reading any of my personal browsing data.
I also demoed the Byos Management Console, a cloud-based web-dashboard used by network administrators or security analysts, giving visibility into the established internet sessions of their remotely connected μGateways.
Byos Founder, Matias Katz, was sitting in the crowd with his own μGateway connected to the Wi-Fi. Using the Management Console, I pushed a security policy update to Matias’ μGateway, blocking Matias’s laptop from making any internet connections with servers based in the United States. Because Matias had already an active session in the US, this country-based block immediately stopped this session and alerted the Management Console dashboard in near real-time.
Capping off the event, there was a question from the audience about Trust, specifically “how can we trust you?”
We’ve been doing everything with the user’s trust and security in mind. The μGateway hardware itself is manufactured in North America with a certified supply chain of components. This eliminates the risk of having spyware on the hardware.
For trust that the μGateway actually protects from the threats we claim, we are actively running a Bug Bounty program. For more information, check out our blog post here.
And for those individual users who are uber skeptical about anyone seeing their activity while using the μGateway, they will take comfort in knowing that individual μGateways only communicate with our servers when its booting up. The μGateway first checks if the user’s license is valid and then if there is an update for the device; after that the communication is severed.