Check Point lays out VPN roadmap

REDWOOD CITY, CALIF. - Check Point Software Technologies has drawn up a virtual private network (VPN) product-direction roadmap that calls for adding multivendor digital certificate support as well as a network failover and clustering capabilities to its VPN-1 gateway.

Today Check Point only supports the Entrust Technologies digital certificate public-key infrastructure (PKI). But by year-end, the Check Point VPN-1 gateway should be able to use digital certificates from VeriSign, Netscape, Baltimore Technologies and Microsoft, as well.

"In our roadmap for Open PKI, we'll offer a choice," says Asheem Chandna, Check Point vice president of marketing and business development.

Corporations issue employees digital certificate IDs to prove their identities and encrypt traffic over the Internet. Customers also want certificates in extranet applications that tie trading partners. Unfortunately, interoperability problems in different vendors' digital certificates have considerably complicated the use of certificate IDs.

Under Check Point's Open PKI strategy, the company's VPN-1 will be able to automatically recognize each certificate type and process it appropriately with each vendor's PKI gear.

Check Point also wants to add a method for selective encryption to its VPN-1 gateway for users who don't want to encrypt all traffic, but only specific application types, destination addresses or user names.

In addition, if a manager wants to set up what Check Point calls a virtual private LAN by installing VPN-1 on the intranet, the network manager will be able to manage dozens of gateways for this type of selective encryption.

VPN-1, which will have Check Point's bandwidth manager FloodGate-1 added, will use a new compression algorithm allowing it to push ten times as much data through the network, Chandna says.

As VPN-based authentication and encryption grow in importance, so does the need to avoid network downtime. Check Point's next version of VPN-1 will work in failover mode, so a primary VPN gateway will failover to a backup VPN should trouble occur.

Also, Check Point claims it will have "VPN clustering" for scalability and performance.

"You'll be able to have up to four VPN-1 gateways working together for up to 155M bit/sec speed," Chandna says.