VMware Launches HyperArmor to Help Customers Cope With a Flood of AI-Found Patches

VMware says it is finding so many flaws in its products with the help of AI that it has created a new product to help customers manage them. Prashanth Shenoy, a vice president of product marketing in Broadcom's VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) division, told The Register that VMware recently moved to monthly software updates, partly to address bugs found by AI. He admitted that customers struggled to keep up before the change, because testing the impact of patches takes time, even though VCF supports live patching that does not cause disruption. Customers, he said, need "room to breathe."

That is where HyperArmor comes in. It does three things. First, it offers "virtual patching", which blocks attempts to exploit a vulnerability without changing the vulnerable software itself. Second, it rejects any actions that alter known good states in VCF; if a human approves a change, the tool updates its policies to allow the new state. Third, it adds multi-factor authentication (MFA), designed to stop attackers using stolen privileged credentials to take over VMware's ESX hypervisor. Users must supply SSH credentials plus a time-based one-time password sent to a user with a verified identity.

HyperArmor will be sold as an add-on to VCF, so customers will pay extra for MFA. The Register notes that VMware did not build it; Broadcom's security businesses, Symantec and Carbon Black, did. This summary covers only the opening of the original article.