Nile Presents at Mobility Field Day 14

Meet Nile with Suresh Katukam

Watch on YouTube
Watch on Vimeo

In this presentation at Mobility Field Day 14, Nile co-founder and Chief Product Officer Suresh Katukam introduces Nile’s vision of delivering the world’s most secure network delivered as a service. Katukam highlights that the company was founded by networking industry veterans, including former Cisco executives Pankaj Patel and John Chambers, with the explicit goal of fundamentally re-engineering campus networking and operational security rather than just refining existing legacy frameworks. The presentation focuses on how Nile’s built-in zero-trust fabric provides data-center-class security, identity-based micro-segmentation, and completely autonomous, hands-off operations, which are backed by financial performance and coverage guarantees.

Katukam contrasts Nile’s approach with traditional networks, which he characterizes as unreliable snowflakes that cannot be easily automated. Instead of bolting AI onto a legacy, broken infrastructure, Nile engineered its hardware and software from the ground up to support true autonomous operations, utilizing a single layer-3 architecture that eliminates standard pitfalls like missing VLANs or stuck ports. The network streams comprehensive real-time data and leverages deployed physical sensors to establish a 360-degree view of the environment. This data is fed into a self-learning, deterministic AI platform that operates with a strict feedback loop to validate network changes and ensure user experience is never compromised.

The session details the division of responsibilities between Nile and its customers, explaining that while users retain complete control over policy, intent, and initial site planning via the NileNav tool, Nile completely automates network design, bill of materials generation, software updates, security patches, and lifecycle management. The speakers emphasize that their autonomous operations are already field-proven across dozens of countries and 12 verticals, allowing some customers to eliminate their ticketing overhead entirely. The presentation concludes by setting up a series of live product demonstrations designed to showcase Nile’s identity, policy, containment, and trust circle features in action.

Personnel: Suresh Katukam

Nile The Mobility Security Gap

Watch on YouTube
Watch on Vimeo

In this presentation at Mobility Field Day 14, Nile co-founder and Chief Product Officer Suresh Katukam emphasizes the critical mobility security gap that exists in modern enterprise campus networks. He challenges the traditional industry approach of connect first, secure later, arguing that by the time a legacy network authenticates a device, malware has already scanned the network and initiated lateral movement. Katukam presents Nile’s secure first, connect later architecture, a built-in zero-trust fabric where every user and device is placed into an isolated segment of one by default. Under this framework, access is never permanently granted and then revoked; instead, trust must be earned and continuously verified with every single connection.

The urgency for a new architectural paradigm is driven by the reality that 80% of devices on campus networks are unmanaged IoT or bring-your-own-device (BYOD) endpoints, which contribute to 60% to 70% of all cybersecurity attacks originating on the campus side. Katukam warns that legacy networks are completely unequipped for the imminent influx of AI agents, which will soon outnumber human identities ten to one. He addresses famous wireless vulnerabilities like AirSnake, explaining that these are fundamentally layer-2 architectural flaws masquerading as Wi-Fi issues due to implicit trust and peer-to-peer visibility. To eliminate these vulnerabilities, Nile delivers a unified, layer-3 fabric that handles wired, wireless, and edge routing as a single entity, natively integrating cloud-based RADIUS, DHCP, and micro-segmentation trust services to replace traditional patchworks of controllers, separate firewalls, and bolted-on network access control (NAC) systems.

Nile’s solution focuses on providing 100% visibility, identity-first authentication, and strict least-privilege access controls that depend on user identity rather than IP addresses, VLANs, or physical location. This clean-slate design collapses what traditionally requires five to seven different products, multiple vendors, and separate operating models into a single, cohesive fabric managed through a single pane of glass. By replacing complex configurations like dynamic VLANs or VXLAN overlays with native fabric-level security, Nile allows organizations to interoperate flexibly with existing brownfield infrastructure or fully adopt Nile’s cloud services. Ultimately, this unified approach removes up to 90% of traditional networking complexity, yielding over 50% savings in total cost of ownership for their customers.

Personnel: Suresh Katukam

Nile Built-In Zero Trust Not Bolted-On

Watch on YouTube
Watch on Vimeo

In this presentation at Mobility Field Day 14, Nile’s VP of Product Management Dipen Vardhe details the technical implementation of the company’s zero-trust networking fabric across its infrastructure, access, and policy layers. Vardhe emphasizes a core design shift away from traditional connect first, secure later models toward a secure first, connect later philosophy where trust must be continuously earned. He introduces a series of live portal demonstrations showing how Nile eliminates standard infrastructure vulnerabilities by disabling local device access protocols like SSH or Telnet, routing all secure administration exclusively through the cloud via a secure gRPC channel, and maintaining a completely undiscoverable network topology to shut down lateral scanning by potential attackers.

The presentation shifts into the access and policy layers, demonstrating how Nile delivers unified management by natively embedding cloud-based RADIUS, agent-less device fingerprinting, and Microsoft Entra/Intune integrations directly into a single dashboard. Vardhe highlights that by replacing traditional, multi-product NAC workflows with a native layer-3 segmentation model, administrators can assign users and endpoints to secure containers via simple drop-down menus, eliminating common configuration errors like mistyped VLAN numbers. In an open Ethernet or MDU context, Nile applies a default-deny posture; any unauthenticated device plugged into a port is isolated into a segment of one and immediately held in the portal for administrative approval rather than being granted implicit network trust.

Vardhe concludes by demonstrating Nile’s continuous verification capabilities, particularly focusing on mitigating MAC address spoofing and IoT vulnerabilities. Because Nile operates strictly inline within the fabric rather than relying on out-of-band SNMP polling, it analyzes upwards of 11 real-time data points, including DHCP, browser agents, mDNS, SSDP, and LLMNR traffic, to achieve high-fidelity endpoint fingerprinting. In the event of a red-team style attack where a rogue device attempts to spoof a printer’s MAC address, the fabric detects the behavior modification, automatically blocks the threat, and utilizes an intuitive dual-observation verification workflow to assist administrators in safely restoring the legitimate device back to the network.

Personnel: Dipen Vardhe

Nile Identity, Policy, Containment

Watch on YouTube
Watch on Vimeo

In this presentation at Mobility Field Day 14, Shiv Mehra details the operational design and implementation of Nile’s built-in zero-trust network fabric, contrasting its architecture with traditional legacy segmentation. Mehra begins by addressing the structural limitations of standard networking, explaining that VLANs were originally engineered to contain broadcast storms, while VXLAN was built for high-scale multi-tenant expansion and data center virtual machine migrations. Neither technology was inherently designed for modern enterprise security or granular micro-segmentation, which typically forces IT administrators to construct brittle patchworks of private VLANs, complex IP access control lists (ACLs), standalone firewalls, and bloated Network Access Control (NAC) overlays. Nile fundamentally re-engineers this approach by delivering host-based segmentation out of the box, executing an identical identity-driven security posture consistently across campuses of any scale–from a tiny two-switch retail site to a massive enterprise network.

Mehra illuminates the technical reality behind Nile’s layer-3 architecture, explaining that all wired and wireless traffic is seamlessly tunneled directly from the physical hardware switches and access points back to a centralized head-end gateway. This design removes the need to configure complex trunk ports or manual VLAN IDs across individual edge switches, effectively mitigating traditional network “snowflake” anomalies. Instead of defining policies by rigid IP subnets or locations, the fabric introduces flexible logical constructs categorized into user, device, and application groups. To demonstrate this functionality, Mehra highlights how multiple personnel types–such as HR, sales, and marketing–can securely share a single subnet while maintaining completely different application access rights. This strategy provides deep operational simplicity by decoupling user privileges from standard network addressing.

The presentation concludes with a live demonstration of Nile’s automated trust engine, focusing on its advanced identity provider (IdP) integration, device fingerprinting, and dynamic quarantine workflows. The fabric utilizes System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) to pull real-time group metadata directly from platforms like Microsoft Entra, ensuring any downstream administrative updates instantly synchronize with Nile’s unified management portal. For IoT devices, Nile couples 11-point inline fingerprinting with an active device validation check that safely queries endpoints via protocols like HTTPS, SSH, or SNMPv3 to differentiate corporate assets from rogue devices. Endpoints that fail these compliance checks are automatically shunted into an isolated, system-defined quarantine group on the same subnet, bypassing the disruptive traditional method of forcing a VLAN swap or an IP address change. Finally, Mehra showcases Nile’s detailed policy log matrix, illustrating how inline flow logs allow administrators to drill down to specific port failures or seamlessly bridge brownfield migrations by monitoring rules in a non-disruptive firewall-forwarding mode.

Personnel: Shiv Mehra

Nile Trust Circles – Beyond the Enterprise

Watch on YouTube
Watch on Vimeo

In this presentation at Mobility Field Day 14, Nile speakers Shiv Mehra and Dipen Vardhe introduce the concept of “trust circles,” an innovative security feature specifically engineered to redefine user-managed micro-segmentation within multi-dwelling units (MDUs), student dormitories, and specialized enterprise environments. In traditional deployments, property managers or IT departments must build and maintain a complex, rigid matrix of unique VLANs for every resident unit to prevent neighboring occupants from accessing private devices. Nile disrupts this legacy model by establishing a single, agnostic layer-3 network segment where all occupants share the same subnet, yet remain dynamically isolated from one another. By natively integrating with property management databases and billing systems via APIs, the fabric automatically spins up restricted, isolated trust circles based on real-time occupant data or single sign-on (SSO) credentials.

Under this self-serve model, residents automatically receive unique pre-shared keys (UPSK) and distinct guest access codes upon checking into a facility. Through the intuitive MyNile portal, residents and students can easily onboard personal endpoints, monitor connected assets, disconnect rogue devices, and selectively grant short-term local access to specific hardware, such as an Xbox or Apple TV, for a roommate, nurse, or visitor without compromising the broader security posture. When questioned about the technical constraints of this architecture, Mehra acknowledges that the automated trust circle framework is optimized for WPA2 but can securely accommodate WPA3 targets provided that the device’s MAC address is supplied to the system, thereby replacing traditional controller-based VLAN configuration with a simplified, priority-driven security layout.

The speakers conclude the session by demonstrating how Nile’s clean-slate architecture effectively immunizes its infrastructure against modern lateral-movement threats like the AirSnitch Wi-Fi attack. Because the fabric enforces true layer-3 host isolation by default, a rogue endpoint cannot masquerade as the gateway or initiate a man-in-the-middle attack, shrinking Nile’s threat advisory footprint to zero compared to the massive configuration checklists required for legacy networks. Rejecting the standard industry practice of relying on complex CLI knobs and best-practice deployment guides, Nile’s engineered-from-scratch hardware and software autonomously monitor and manage themselves globally. Ultimately, the speakers define Nile not as a hardware vendor but as a security company that utilizes a highly automated, single unified networking fabric to deliver connectivity that operates as safely and invisibly as public electricity.

Personnel: Dipen Vardhe, Shiv Mehra