Glasswall launched Glasswall Genesis, a Zero Trust file protection solution designed to give organizations greater confidence in the files entering, leaving and moving between their systems.
Traditional security tools try to determine whether a file is malicious. But a clean verdict is a point-in-time judgment, not proof that everything inside a file can be trusted. New, targeted or deliberately evasive threats can remain hidden inside legitimate file formats.
Genesis treats every file as untrusted. It takes the file apart, validates its structure against the published specification for that file type and rebuilds a new, policy-compliant version using only content that conforms and that the organization permits. This approach is known as Content Disarm and Reconstruction, or CDR.
The result is a known-good, usable file, delivered before it reaches a user or application or crosses a trust boundary. With it comes a transparent record of what was found, what changed and why. Trust comes from controlling what is allowed to exist in the delivered file, not from recognizing a particular attack.
“Zero Trust transformed how organizations think about identity and networks, but files are still too often trusted,” said Paul Farrington, Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Glasswall. “Files remain one of the most direct routes into an organization, and detection will always be one unseen sample behind. Genesis closes that gap by bringing Zero Trust inside the file. It is also the most significant engineering step we’ve taken in a decade.”
“Every byte has to earn its place. We validate what belongs, remove or reject what doesn’t and rebuild the file from what is explicitly allowed. That gives security teams something more useful than another clean verdict: confidence in what they’re letting across the boundary.”
Broad file protection without sacrificing usability
Genesis processes more than 45 file formats and 140 extensions, ranging from Office documents, PDFs and images to specialist formats used in defense, intelligence, engineering and healthcare. These include NITF and SIDD geospatial imagery, DWG, DXF and STEP AP242 engineering files, and DICOM medical imaging.
Other tools flatten complex files into PDFs or simpler formats for safe transfer. Genesis rebuilds specialist files in their native formats, preserving the fidelity, functionality and operational value of the original.
Security teams can also control how different findings are handled. Content can be reported, surfaced for review, replaced, removed or rejected according to file format, content type or individual rule, while structured reporting logs every decision. Rules are traceable to published file-format specifications, NSA Inspection and Sanitization Guidance, CVEs, security advisories and Glasswall research.
Genesis helps prevent sensitive information from leaving the organization. It can identify and redact personally identifiable information, secrets and cloud credentials across visible content, metadata, comments and other non-visible structures, extending Data Loss Prevention into places conventional controls my not inspect.
