BURLINGTON, VT. - Elron Software's latest firewall includes IP Security-based encryption tunneling and improved filtering of IP traffic.
Product manager Chris Belthoss says the Elron Firewall for Windows NT 3.0 can open an encrypted tunnel to other IPSec-based firewalls, including those from CheckPoint, Cisco and Network Associates. The scope of this interoperability is fairly limited, Belthoss acknowledged, since vendors are still struggling to get some IPSec capabilities, such as automated timeout, to work harmoniously.
"It's still a matter of understanding what's on the other side of that tunnel," Belthoss points out.
In other areas, such as controlling network traffic in and out of the firewall, Elron's latest product release shows further refinement in its filtering mechanisms. Specifically, Elron has added firewall application-level command filtering for Web, e-mail and FTP.
"This means you can set security policies down the command level, allowing or disallowing traffic based on source and destination of IP traffic," Belthoss says. The FTP protocol, for example, is written to support about 30 different commands, such as "get," "put" or "delete." The Elron firewall, which used state approved inspection techniques to examine firewall-bound traffic, lets the network manager fine tune the allowed FTP activity down to this command level.
In other improvements, Elron Firewall for NT 3.0 now supports H.323 videoconferencing so that the appropriate port is dynamically opened at the start of an interactive multimedia session between participants, and later automatically shut down. Elron has also added a way to search through logs for specific event data.
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