Nokia, Trend Micro team on content security

Nokia and software maker Trend Micro announced an alliance last week to produce a corporate e-mail security appliance that joins Trend Micro's antivirus technology to Nokia's hardware and software.

Called Nokia Message Protector SC6600, the new gateway appliance will analyze inbound and outbound e-mail traffic, according to Dan MacDonald, vice president of product management and marketing at Nokia Internet Communications, a division of Nokia.

"Eighty-seven percent of all exploits enter a network through e-mail," MacDonald says. "Companies have firewalls in place, but there's a river running under that firewall called e-mail, and it has a lot of nasty things in it."

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Nokia and software maker Trend Micro announced an alliance last week to produce a corporate e-mail security appliance that joins Trend Micro's antivirus technology to Nokia's hardware and software.

Called Nokia Message Protector SC6600, the new gateway appliance will analyze inbound and outbound e-mail traffic, according to Dan MacDonald, vice president of product management and marketing at Nokia Internet Communications, a division of Nokia.

"Eighty-seven percent of all exploits enter a network through e-mail," MacDonald says. "Companies have firewalls in place, but there's a river running under that firewall called e-mail, and it has a lot of nasty things in it."

According to Nokia, inbound e-mail and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol  traffic will be directed to the SC6600 from a corporate firewall. For each e-mail message directed to it, the SC6600 gateway will set aside a copy and break that message into its constituent elements. The SC6600 then analyzes the message, any attachments to the message, and elements such as macros and message fonts.

Each component of an e-mail is processed by Nokia's statistical inspection engine on the SC6600. If a virus or exploit is detected, the entire message is quarantined and a report is sent back to the message's sender and to its recipients, according to MacDonald.

Trend Micro is providing antivirus technology that will be used in the Nokia message protector component of the SC6600. Nokia provides other components that perform content filtering, URL filtering, spam rejection and exploit rejection.

Trend Micro manages virus signature updates and alerts and reports to a back-end server operated by Nokia. Those updates will be verified and run through quality control checks by Nokia, signed and then pushed out to SC6600s at customer sites using an automated update feature, according to MacDonald and Kevin Murray, senior product manager at Trend Micro in Tokyo.

The automatic update feature is a mandatory component of the SC6600, although customers can determine how frequently they want their appliances to check for updates, MacDonald says. Manual virus signature updates are not possible, he says.

Outbound e-mail also will be analyzed by the SC6600. Customers can block specific file attachments and text strings such as domain names from being sent out by employees using e-mail, MacDonald says.

Administrators will use a Web-based management interface to indicate what information or types of information should be blocked, he says.

The SC6600 will be a one-rack, dual-processor appliance. It will use Nokia's IPSO operating system and will be optimized for e-mail message protection, capable of processing 15K-byte e-mail messages at a rate of 120,000 per hour, MacDonald says.

The device is being targeted at midsize to large companies of 1,000 employees or more. It will sell for about $16,000, not including Trend Micro's per-user license of about $22, MacDonald and Murray say.

Nokia is competing with companies such as NetScreen Technologies and Symantec in the growing market for network security appliances that halt viruses and thwart attacks at the network edge before they reach critical systems.