Patent ID: 11966482
Assignee: SOPHOS LIMITED
Field: Digital communication (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G  H | IPC G  H

Claim 8:
9. A computer program product for managing network flows comprising computer executable code embodied on a non-transitory computer readable medium that, when executing on a firewall, performs the steps of:
receiving, at a firewall of an enterprise network, a network message from a process executing on an endpoint;
transmitting a request from the firewall to a local security agent on the endpoint to retrieve identifying information for an application associated with the process from a process cache in a kernel space of an operating system for the endpoint, wherein the process cache stores the identifying information for the application as cryptographically secured process metadata;
receiving, from the local security agent in response to the request, the cryptographically secured process metadata for the application;
at the firewall, cryptographically verifying the identifying information for the application retrieved from the process cache of the endpoint; and
applying a security policy for the enterprise network to the network message at the firewall according to the identifying information for the application in the cryptographically secured process metadata retrieved from the process cache and cryptographically verified at the firewall and an application type for the application.