Product Update #1

Ever since the launch of our free plan, we were hard at work gathering feedback from early adopters, improving our user experience, and addressing the bugs that inevitably appear once a wider audience starts using a product. This is the first major update to our platform since then, and we are excited to give you a brief overview of the changes.

Progress is inevitable

One annoyance we were unable to address in time for our first release was the fact that there was very little visual feedback that something was happening after a scan was launched. Sure, there was a little box that said "Analyzing", but that was about it. And what if the scan failed for some reason? Absolutely no information on what went wrong, just "Failed" in large red letters.

Starting today (or, to be honest, last Wednesday, since we rolled out this updated silently last week), you will get detailed feedback on the status of running and completed scans. We also tried to expose the reason for scan failures as much as we could, but we will continue to tune this in the coming weeks.

Scans in progress are no longer opaque items in a list either - in progress and failed reports can now be viewed and show the current state of the scan. As the scan progresses, more and more of the report becomes available, and even if it fails, we might still be able to show you some information.

Engine improvements

One of the reasons the lack of feedback on scan progress was annoying is that scans could take a really long time to finish - but we were able to improve on that as well. The speed at which the animations run in the previous section are actually indicative of the performance of our platform right now. Firmware scans now finish in just a minute or two (more complex images might take longer, but will still be significantly faster than before).

Speed is not the only aspect of our engine that has gotten better. This update also delivers a bunch of smaller improvements, that all add up to better overall accuracy:

• Revamped dependency detection engine
• Preliminary support for images built around BSD variants
• Much better handling of stripped binaries and OpenWRT based images
• More descriptive file system names in the extracted tarball
• Crypto assets embedded in ELF executables are now correctly recognized

Cryptography for a wider audience

The Cryptography report has also received a facelift to better take advantage of screen real estate and bring you more details on each asset.

What's next

From a technical perspective, this update has been a bigger one. From now on, you can expect incremental updates from us every week or two. If you run into any issues with the new features, or you have feedback on how we can make the product better - contact us. There is an actual human reading your messages on the other end of the form, I promise.