Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Joe Lea, VP of Product at Armis (Part 3)

Joe Lea: We’ve been around for three years. We’re VC-backed by Sequoia, Red Dot, Bain Capital, and Tenaya. We have about 200 different customer deployments. Where we’re deployed, we’re seeing activity in the industry and we’re learning about devices. That source of knowledge for us is important. We’ve got about 120 employees.

We’re doing business with a lot of different customers, about 11 of those are Fortune 100. We are focused on the larger enterprise, but we work with small and medium size businesses as well. We have an amazing research team. Externally, we’ve done disclosures around high profile vulnerabilities like BlueBorne, which was an exploit that was impacting over five billion different devices out there.

Recently, our research team uncovered some vulnerabilities. We did a disclosure called BleedingBit where we discovered two critical chip-level vulnerabilities exposing millions of different enterprise access points. Armis has done amazing work within this space and won lots of awards like FC – finalist for the best threat detection technology. We’ve got a long list of awards. It’s been an exciting place to work.

The way that Armis came across my radar was this entirely different technical approach. When you address IoT and unmanageable kinds of devices, the main design consideration is that you can’t interfere with them. We said it’s important within healthcare where patient care is on the line or manufacturing where if you disrupt the factory floor and the equipment that’s there, you potentially have millions of dollars in lost profitability.

You can’t run agents on the device. You can’t scam them and risk tipping them over. You have to come up with ways of passively watching them, being able to see that inventory, and understand what the devices are and account for them. You then begin to continuously monitor them for changes that may look suspicious. There are a whole range other of use cases.

The way in which Armis has tackled this problem is revolutionary. It looks at the network traffic on both the wired and the wireless networks to be able to zip through that traffic and pull out characteristics that allow us to fingerprint all the different devices in the environment. Throughout the course of those 200 or so deployments, Armis has built this massive knowledge base. This is a key point.

That knowledge base now has about seven million different profiles of devices. By looking at the behavior on the network and that network traffic, we can tell you that we see, let’s say, a particular make and model of a Samsung smart TV. We can identify that make and model from the traffic and characteristics like open ports and what the traffic itself looks like.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Joe Lea, VP of Product at Armis
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