FileDNA Airlock
The engine your antivirus never has to scan.
FileDNA Airlock packages the CADR engine on an isolated USB device: the desktop keeps only a lightweight link, every file is pulled onto the device, analyzed and disarmed entirely on its own isolated storage, and the clean file is written back — so the engine and its working files never sit on the volume your antivirus actively scans.
How It Works
Airlock keeps the engine, and everything it touches while it works, entirely off the desktop’s own drive.
1
Connect
The device plugs in over USB and installs a single lightweight link on the desktop — not the CADR engine itself, just a pointer to where it now lives.
2
Pull the file
When a file is opened, saved, or downloaded, the desktop link hands it to the engine running on the device, without processing anything on the host itself.
3
Analyze and disarm, isolated
CADR runs entirely on the device’s own isolated storage and workspace — outside the folders, processes, and file locks the desktop’s antivirus actively watches.
4
Write back
The clean, reconstructed file is written back to its original desktop location per policy, replacing the original the same way it does everywhere else in the FileDNA line.
Key Capabilities
Built around one advantage software alone can’t offer: a physical boundary between the engine and whatever else is watching the desktop’s drive.
Isolated by hardware, not just software
The engine and its working files live on a separate physical volume, so IT can exclude that volume from endpoint AV scanning without excluding anything on the host’s own drive — removing a real source of double-scanning bottlenecks and file-lock contention.
Same engine, a different form factor
Airlock runs the same CADR engine as FileDNA Desktop; this is a hardware-isolated deployment option, not a different scanner with different behavior or verdicts.
Minimal host footprint
The desktop side is just a lightweight link to the device — the engine itself, its temporary reconstruction files, and its updates all live on the isolated hardware, not the host’s own drive.
Policy that travels with the device
The same origin-aware policy and fail-open/fail-closed choice as the rest of the FileDNA line, carried on hardware that can move between machines instead of being tied to one install.
Who It’s For
Security and IT teams who’ve hit AV-vs-CADR file-lock or double-scan performance problems running a software engine directly on the endpoint.
High-security or air-gapped environments where installing a full software engine on the workstation isn’t approved, but a single-purpose isolated device is.
Field, travel, or shared-workstation scenarios where CADR enforcement needs to travel with a person rather than stay tied to one installed machine.
Airlock runs the same CADR engine as FileDNA Desktop, packaged onto isolated hardware instead of installed directly on the host OS — pick Desktop for a standard software install, Airlock where isolating the engine from the host’s own antivirus and file system is itself the requirement.