Patent ID: 8171504

Claim:
A method of providing driver functionality in a computer, the method comprising: forming at least one isolated sandbox on a remote computing system; during an attempt to install a host driver in a host operating system (OS), installing a driver stub in the host operating system instead of 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 Application Programming Interface (API) function calls supported by the host driver, including API interfaces and API call parameters; installing a sandbox driver in the at least one isolated sandbox; using a gateway, which includes a network communication means, to redirect 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 to transmit responses back from the sandbox driver to the host OS, wherein the stub provides access to functionality of the sandbox driver via the gateway and invokes the sandbox driver through the gateway and using the redirecting; and wherein the sandbox driver uses the gateway to interface to host API.