Cisco Hypershield is a distributed, AI-native security solution. It acts as a fabric of security, comprising of security agents that run alongside your software applications, physical or virtual firewall appliances that contain dual data planes, allowing you to test firewall policies before deployment, and an AI-powered backend that intelligently orchestrates security policies across the Hypershield security fabric.

The Hypershield AI Assistant is an interactive "bot" that can help you leverage Hypershield effectively by answering questions in a variety of areas, including configuration, security insights, network posture, metrics, and terminology.

Tesseract Security Agents (TSA) are pieces of software that run alongside customer workloads in privileged mode. They are what allow Hypershield to monitor network behavior for malicious activity, allow Hypershield to suggest autosegmentation policies, and deploy compensating controls upon detection.

A dual data plane is the implementation of two data planes to process network traffic: a primary data plane and a shadow data plane. By building a shadow data plane to process the same network packets in parallel, Hypershield allows users to test firewall updates before promoting them to the primary data plane.

A mitigating control, also called an "exploit shield", is a piece of software that is temporarily deployed to keep an attacker from exploiting a vulnerability, until the affected software is formally patched. In Hypershield, the mitigating controls are delivered as Tetragonal Tracing Policies, and applied through the eBPF framework.