Bromium's technology, built around its Bromium Microvisor software, uses hardware virtualization capabilities in the Intel x86 architecture but doesn't create virtual machines, which Bromium says degrade the user experience and can't truly solve the problem anyway. Instead, the Microvisor creates what Bromium calls Micro-VMs, which run just one task instead of an entire OS instance.

Bromium will take a fundamentally different approach to security compared with most systems, said Simon Crosby, its co-founder and chief technology officer, who introduced the company at the GigaOM Structure conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. Trying to protect users from anything unknown in the outside world hurts productivity, because employees need to reach outside their enterprise networks to get their jobs done, Crosby said.

"Today, IT can only raise the walls higher, like the ancient city of Troy," Crosby said. That's an endless battle, because it's inevitable that users will download malicious or faulty code, he said. "We are gullible, and programmers are fallible."

Bromium takes the fight inside the system instead. It can address both items that are suspect themselves and ones that may be legitimate but vulnerable to attack. When a user goes to a website or downloads an application or piece of content that may not be trustworthy, the Microvisor creates a Micro-VM and puts that code in it. It can create 100 Micro-VMs in a second, one for each task that wants to run and each tab in a browser, Crosby said.

For example, the Microvisor could create a Micro-VM specifically for a secure Web session on a consumer's banking site, which would isolate the password entry from any keyloggers that might reside on the PC, Crosby said. Micro-VMs are invisible to the user, and a downloaded application such as an "Angry Birds" game on an enterprise PC could permanently run within a Micro-VM without affecting performance, he said.