Pods & Portals — Frequently Asked Questions

Faction Pods and Portals are purpose-built, Made-in-USA, cyber-assured Zero Trust hardware gateways that extend Zero Trust to a physical location over Wi-Fi and Ethernet. Connect any device behind one — smart, dumb, or legacy — and it joins your private, owner-controlled Faction Network: invisible and inaccessible on the public internet, reachable only by you, with nothing installed on the device itself.

A Pod suits smaller sites and distributed teams; a Portal is the higher-capacity appliance for factories, business locations, and larger device fleets.

Both bring devices behind them into your Faction Network the same way — the difference is capacity and reach:

• Pod — compact and low-cost, ideal for small offices, home offices, and distributed sites.
• Portal — higher capacity for factories, business locations, and larger fleets.

Additional models address specialized needs, including a long-range HaLow Portal for industrial, agricultural, and smart-infrastructure sites (on the roadmap).

Anything that connects — regardless of age or capability — and especially the OT and IoT that software-only tools can't protect:

• IP cameras and the video streams they produce
• Industrial controllers, PLCs, and SCADA equipment
• Factory-floor machines, legacy and modern
• Sensors, robots, and automation systems
• Building systems — HVAC, access control, elevators
• Medical, lab, point-of-sale, and kiosk devices
• Printers, scanners, and network-attached storage
• Legacy equipment that can no longer be patched

No. Protection lives in the Pod or Portal, not on the device. Devices are protected simply by connecting behind it — no agent, no OS changes — so even devices that can't run software are covered.

Three principles:

• Owner-created keys. Adoption uses your Faction Network key, created and held on your own devices. No one else — including Faction — has it.
• Out-of-band authentication. A direct invitation and key exchange that isn't exposed to external observation or attack — no phishable credentials.
• Network invisibility. Once adopted, everything behind the Pod is off the public internet and reachable only from inside your Faction — removing the internet attack surface.

Your devices are visible and controlled only by you. Faction routes your encrypted traffic but holds no keys and cannot read what you protect — that's Zero Knowledge as a property of the architecture, not a policy promise.

Yes — in two senses. Faction Pods and Portals are Made in the USA through our manufacturing partnership with Davolink and Z-AXIS — not the foreign-made gear now on the FCC's Covered List.

They are also Made-Safe in the USA: in partnership with ORION, every unit is cyber-assured —

• Forensic inspection — chip-off and motherboard analysis
• Supply-chain verification
• Source-code and protocol inspection
• Red-team OT/IoT lab testing
• Continuous integrity monitoring after deployment

No. The devices Pods protect typically can't be secured by a VPN router — they lack the resources for encryption or a programmable interface, or they're legacy and IoT with no modern OS. And firewalls only wall off parts of a network; they're routinely bypassed and don't make devices invisible. A Pod takes the device off the internet entirely and into your owner-controlled network.

There's a deeper problem: many of the consumer and business routers people rely on are the foreign-made gear the FCC has placed on its Covered List as an unacceptable national-security risk. Layering a VPN on top of a compromised router doesn't fix it. Faction Pods and Portals are Made-in-USA and cyber-assured — and they take your devices off the internet rather than trusting the router in front of them.

Great question — it's exactly the threat the FCC and U.S. cyber officials are warning about: foreign-made routers and smart devices that may already be pre-positioned inside ordinary networks. Faction is built for this:

• Take it off the internet. Bring the device behind a Pod or Portal and it becomes invisible and inaccessible on the public internet — cutting off the path an attacker uses to reach it or call home.
• Contain what you can't replace. Owner-controlled trust and micro-segmentation with Groups keep a questionable device isolated, so even if it is compromised it can't move laterally to anything else.
• Factionize — don't rip-and-replace. Faction's services and software secure the hardware you already run, and replace only what genuinely can't be brought up to standard with Made-in-USA, cyber-assured Pods and Portals.

You don't have to trust the gear that's already there. You put it inside a network whose keys and control belong only to you.

Cloud SDNs and ZTNA platforms can micro-segment software-defined traffic — but they are software running on top of your network, and that is the limit. They can't put an agent on a camera, a PLC, or a legacy machine, and they still trust the routers, switches, and smart devices underneath them. If that hardware is the foreign-made gear on the FCC's Covered List — or a Trojan-horse smart device — the compromise sits beneath the layer the software controls, and segmenting the traffic above it doesn't help. Most also depend on a cloud control plane that becomes a high-value target of its own.

Faction is different because it is hardware-native:

• Pods & Portals bring the device itself off the public internet and into your encrypted, owner-controlled overlay — no agent required.
• Groups give true micro-segmentation, each with its own keys: access is binary — you hold the key, or you have no access at all.
• The gateway isn't the weak link — Pods and Portals are Made-in-USA and cyber-assured, so you aren't segmenting on top of hardware you can't trust.
• There is no cloud control plane off which to pivot — trust and keys belong to you.

Click, Scan, Adopt — done. Connect the Pod to your modem or router by Ethernet or Wi-Fi, scan the QR code on the device in the Faction app, then connect the devices you want to protect. There's nothing to install on the devices, and you can organize them into Groups if you like.

No. Pods and Portals are low-cost and flexible, with models for different ranges and capacities. Deploy as many as you need. Support is simple too: if a unit ever fails, replace it and re-adopt it in seconds — no support calls or hours of troubleshooting.

Talk to us — and look at Factionize Your Infrastructure. Rather than ripping out and replacing what you run, Faction's services and software lay owner-controlled trust over your existing networks, devices, and workloads:

• Deploy alongside your current infrastructure — no rip-and-replace, no service interruption.
• Owner-controlled trust — trust relationships and keys originate with your organization, not a vendor.
• Out-of-band cryptographic identity for users and devices — impervious to phishing and credential theft.
• Secure existing hardware in place, and replace only what genuinely can't be brought up to standard — with Cyber-Assured Pods and Portals.
• Reach OT & IoT that software-only models can't, and adopt Zero Trust at your own pace.

For specialized hardware we can work with you, and with OEMs as needed, to meet custom requirements. Explore Factionize Your Infrastructure →