Fortinet Presents at Security Field Day 16

Fortinet’s Security Fabric and Vision

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Fortinet is much more than a firewall company, we offer a platform of cybersecurity products giving Security professionals what they need to build a secure network. Anthony James, Fortinet’s EVP of Marketing, opened the company’s Security Field Day 16 presentation. He is in his second tour at Fortinet, having first worked there from 2004 to 2010, and he gave an overview of the company’s platform philosophy and how its portfolio has grown over 26 years.

James argued that “platform” has become an overused term in the industry. Fortinet was founded in 2000 on the idea that every product should run on a single unified operating system, and that idea grew into what the company calls the fabric. In his definition, a true platform shares unified data, unified policy, and unified management. Vendors that acquire companies and connect their products through backend APIs, with separate consoles, end up with a stitched-together architecture instead. Fortinet’s firewalls, SASE, and SD-WAN all run on the same operating system, and any new technology entering the portfolio must meet all three requirements. James organized the portfolio into two pillars. The first combines SASE and firewalls and includes hybrid mesh firewalls, LAN edge, recently announced AI gateways, unified SASE, network operations, and unified communications. He said customers increasingly buy firewalls, SASE, and SD-WAN together, which simplifies purchasing, deployment, onboarding, and management. The second pillar is AI SecOps. It uses AI to shorten investigation and remediation times for security operators, and it secures AI deployments with guardrails. This pillar also covers endpoint protection that consolidates antivirus, next-generation endpoint, and ZTNA capabilities, along with AI SOC and data security.

James traced Fortinet’s path from a multifunction firewall with basic application security to today’s broad portfolio. He said every addition was built on the same operating system, so customers never faced disparate experiences. That consistency is the commitment he emphasized looking forward. He said more products would arrive in the coming weeks, all built on the same unified data, policy, and management foundation. He framed this as the dividing line between Fortinet’s fabric and competitors’ acquired, API-linked portfolios.

Personnel: Anthony James

Put AI Agents into Production without Losing Control with Fortinet

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As AI reaches production, agents act independently. FortiAIGate, a self-hosted AI gateway, stops prompt injection and data leaks. Roll out AI faster, with policy, spend, and data under your control. Patrick Bedwell of Fortinet’s product marketing organization presented FortiAIGate at Security Field Day 16. He described it as a single control point between AI applications and the models they call.

Bedwell opened with survey data. Nine in ten organizations have adopted AI, 20% have suffered a model-related data breach this year, roughly half have overspent their AI budgets, and three-quarters worry about data sovereignty. Traditional tools inspect payloads and files, so they miss attacks written in plain language, such as jailbreaks, poisoned tool calls, and denial-of-wallet prompts. FortiAIGate works as a secure reverse proxy and runs on Kubernetes clusters with NVIDIA GPUs. It inspects every prompt, response, and MCP tool call. Its guardrails include technology from a company Fortinet acquired this summer, and they detect sensitive data across 35 entity types, nine languages, and five media types. Customers can test and modify detectors before deploying them. They can also start from more than 50 governance templates, including HIPAA and GDPR, or import a policy document to generate guardrails. Violations can be blocked, redacted, replaced with realistic fake data, or flagged with an alert. Workspaces enforce access rules and hard budget caps per user, project, and model, and those budgets can reset daily or monthly.

Bedwell’s clearest example was an email-summarizing agent hijacked by an indirect prompt injection. Guardrails that check only the first prompt and the final response would miss that attack, but FortiAIGate sees every step in between. Full logging also gives auditors proof of what an application did with customer data. Bedwell was candid about the current limits. FortiAIGate does not see shadow AI traffic to SaaS tools, which FortiGate covers instead. Substituted data cannot be swapped back in the model’s response. The product requires NVIDIA GPUs. Performance figures for the newly integrated guardrails will be published after testing. He placed FortiAIGate within Fortinet’s broader AI protection strategy: FortiGate at the perimeter, FortiCNAPP for workloads and pipelines, FortiWeb and FortiAppSec for APIs, and FortiAIGate guarding the model itself.

Personnel: Patrick Bedwell

Securing OT Cyber Risk with the Fortinet OT Security Platform

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OT cybersecurity risk provides unique challenges based on OT use cases, devices and threat vectors. The OT Security Platform provides the basic solutions of visibility and segmentation to advanced OT SecOps. Rich Springer, Fortinet’s Senior Director of Product Marketing for OT, presented the OT Security Platform at Security Field Day 16. He described it as an extension of the Fortinet Security Fabric into operational technology.

Springer explained why OT needs its own approach. Some PLCs have run for 20 to 40 years, may never get patches, and sit behind maintenance windows months apart. The air gap is a myth, and remote access by OEMs and contractors over always-on VPNs is the leading attack vector. Manufacturing has been the top target for five years running because ransomware crews can monetize production loss. Meanwhile, nation-state attacks such as those on US water utilities are designed to demonstrate capability. The platform starts with FortiGate for segmentation and visibility and extends through FortiLink to FortiSwitch for micro-segmentation. It also includes rugged, fanless hardware for harsh sites. Springer said FortiOS recently earned IEC 62443 certification at security level four, which he said no other vendor holds. Fortinet’s OT security service understands about 150 industrial protocols and adds OT-specific IPS rules and automated virtual patching. Operators can run the virtual patching in learn mode to confirm there are no false positives before enforcing it. FortiAnalyzer includes NERC CIP reporting templates and a Purdue model view of the OT network. FortiSOAR includes playbooks mapped to MITRE ATT&CK for ICS, and FortiPAM provides browser-based remote access for third parties. FortiDeceptor can mimic OT devices and their protocols to lure attackers.

Springer said OT risk has moved into the C-suite and usually lands on the CISO, and that pressure is speeding customers toward OT SecOps. Most customers are still working on segmentation and visibility. Many joint IT/OT SOCs drop OT alerts because their analysts don’t know how to handle them. Fortinet is building an OT cybersecurity data lake so AI tools can support OT SOC work. The platform can also run on its own without the IT fabric. Springer closed by warning that the OT market is crowded with niche, standalone vendors, and each one adds another console and another operator. In his view, securing OT will ultimately depend on integrated tools and on people who can work across both IT and OT.

Personnel: Rich Springer

Fortinet and Post Quantum Cryptography: How to be Prepared

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The power of quantum computers changes the encryption landscape. Migrating to algorithms that are quantum resilient is a non-negligible task for companies to tackle. Fortinet can help, from giving crypto visibility across your footprint to integrating crypto agility into our firewalls. At Security Field Day 16, Chris Borales and Wei Ling Neo of Fortinet explained how the company supports post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration.

Borales, who handles product marketing for Fortinet’s network detection portfolio, warned that attackers are already harvesting data now to decrypt it later. He cited estimates that classical cryptography faces a 15% chance of being broken by 2026, roughly 75% by 2030, and near certainty by 2034. Organizations that keep data for long periods, such as healthcare, finance, and government, face the greatest risk. FortiNDR Cloud builds a cryptographic inventory without decrypting traffic. It reads the handshake negotiations that happen in the clear and reports TLS and SSH PQC compliance, weak ciphers, and servers that ignore PQC-capable clients, with drill-down to individual IP addresses. Neo, who covers FortiOS and FortiGate in product management, pointed to US deadlines of the end of 2030 for quantum-safe key exchange and 2031 for digital signatures, with similar timelines in the EU and Australia. FortiManager tracks crypto inventory and configuration drift across the FortiGate fleet. Neo said drift often appears when security teams forbid fallback to classical algorithms but operations teams relax that setting to restore broken VPNs. FortiAnalyzer reports which TLS 1.3 sources and destinations are not using PQC. In IPsec testing, ML-KEM-768 offered the best balance of security and performance, while FrodoKEM and BIKE took more than three times as long to set up tunnels. ML-DSA certificates roughly halved performance compared with ECDSA. Fortinet’s NP7 ASIC accelerates traffic after the initial key exchange, and a demo showed more than 2,000 tunnels running with ML-DSA authentication.

Neo stressed that PQC carries real performance costs, so certificate optimizations are likely as the industry adapts. Fortinet has tested interoperability with strongSwan and will not fall back to classical algorithms when PQC is explicitly configured. Asked about a recently reported AI-discovered weakness in the Falcon algorithm, Neo said none has been found in ML-KEM. He added that defense should be layered, combining classical and quantum-safe algorithms and eventually adding quantum key distribution, which relies on physics rather than mathematical difficulty.

Personnel: Chris Borales, Wei Ling Neo