Patent ID: 7941813

Claim:
A method of providing driver functionality in a computer, the method comprising: installing a full-functional host operating system (OS) on the computer; forming at least one isolated sandbox running under control of a common supporting means; during an attempt to install a host driver in the host operating system, installing a driver stub in the host operating system to replace the host driver, wherein the stub is installed in low-level kernel space and is accessible from the at least one isolated sandbox, wherein the stub supports all Application Programming Interface (API) function calls supported by the host driver, including API interfaces and API call parameters; installing a sandbox driver in one of the isolated sandboxes; and using a gateway between the driver stub and the sandbox driver running inside the sandbox to provide an interface for redirecting Application Programming Interface (API) requests from the driver stub to the sandbox driver for execution of the requests in the sandbox instead of in the host OS, and for transmitting responses back from the sandbox driver to the host operating system, wherein the stub provides access to functionality of the sandbox driver in the sandbox via the gateway and invokes the sandbox driver through the gateway and using the redirection; wherein the sandbox driver uses the stub through the gateway to interface to host OS Application Programming Interface.