Annual security event borrowing a page from Black Hat, too
Juniper, IBM and Verizon will be among the big-name companies airing new products and services in San Francisco next week at the RSA Conference, the annual security industry event that is expected to draw 17,000 attendees and 350 exhibitors.
Juniper, IBM and Verizon will be among the big-name companies airing new products and services in San Francisco this week at the RSA Conference, the annual security industry event that is expected to draw 17,000 attendees and 350 exhibitors.
Show organizers are aiming for an edgier event than in years past, taking a page from the annual Black Hat Conference and adding a track dedicated to the sorts of researchers known to rip the lid off security vulnerabilities. Virtualization security, network access control, data leakage prevention and protecting against Web 2.0-borne malware will be among hot topics for discussion. Top executives from EMC’s RSA security division, CA, Symantec and IBM Internet Security Systems will deliver keynotes.
While IBM, Verizon and some others are keeping their news under wraps until April 8, Juniper revealed that it will air its next-generation intrusion-detection and intrusion-prevention appliance line, which some analysts say will put the company’s offerings at the front of the pack of intrusion-prevention systems (IPS).(Compare Intrusion Prevention Systems.)
Juniper will look to generate lots of buzz with four new appliances — the IDP 75, 250, 800 and 8200 — that scale from 150Mbps to 10Gbps. The previous high-end Juniper appliance topped out at 1Gbps.
Jon Oltsik, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, says “a few others, TippingPoint, Internet Security Systems [now part of IBM] and McAfee,” have gear to compete at those speeds. But he considers these more like a “security add-on” to prevent attacks, while Juniper’s IDP devices are meant to work with other equipment for wider security management, such as network-access control.
Another factor is using IPS not just at the perimeter of the network but in the core, where speeds are usually higher, in enterprise and carrier networks.
HCR Manor Care, which has a data center in Toledo, Ohio and uses Juniper’s older 1100F appliance, anticipates migrating to the IDP 8200. “We have multiple 1100Fs inside the data center, but we need to be able to have higher speeds,” says Craig Hulbert, senior network engineer for information services.
HCR uses the Juniper IPS to protect against attacks and to cordon off data according to three company-designated classifications — public, restricted and confidential — by using a Juniper profiling mechanism that helps segment data. “If anyone tries to go after unauthorized data, we treat that as an attack,” Hulbert says.
Rajneesh Chopra, Juniper’s director of product management, says the management console for the new appliance line will also support the older IDP 50, 200, 600 and 1100 devices so customers can mix and match. “You can take the policy you had with the older equipment and push it out to the new,” he says. Juniper’s new IDP line, which costs from $8,000 to $70,000, supports 5 million simultaneous sessions at the high end.
Microsoft, meanwhile, has canceled its slate of demos and ship-date announcements around its Identity Lifecycle Manager 2.0 (ILM) software.
ILM is Microsoft’s platform for identity synchronization, certificate and password management, and user provisioning. It was originally the company’s meta-directory technology and was previously called Microsoft Identity Integration Server.
Microsoft is resetting the time table to hype ILM to this summer when it hosts its TechEd conference, according to sources. The software likely won’t ship until the end of this year at the earliest. (Compare Identity Management products.)
Version 2.0 includes a number of user self-service features. It also includes a new delegation model and a business process framework. ILM 2.0 features a set of services that users and partners can tap to extend the server’s functionality.
With ILM off the agenda, Microsoft is left to showcase Stirling, a product it doesn’t plan to ship for more than a year. Stirling is a single console for all of Microsoft’s Forefront security products. The software was unveiled last summer.
Microsoft said it will integrate desktop, server and network protection technologies such as antimalware, antispam, content filtering, messaging and collaboration systems and the network edge.
Many other vendors are hitting the technology runway at the RSA Conference. Here’s a sampling:
* Bradford Networks is adding guest access features to its NAC Director access-control platform. The new Guest Contractor Services (GCS) software enables designated employees to authorize guests or consultants to gain network access, lightening the load of network administrators. GCS authentication can be stored within NAC Director or it can come from existing Active Directory stores. NAC Director GCS is available this summer. (Compare Network Access Control products.)
* eEye Digital Security will announce the Retina Appliance 651, a shoebox-sized appliance weighing 6 pounds that combines the eEye Retina Network Security Scanner, Iris Network Traffic Analyzer and Blink professional host-based intrusion prevention. Costing $42,495 and available March 24, the appliance is intend for vulnerability assessment and tracking in small offices or for consultants on the road.
* FaceTime will add filtering capability for hundreds of “greynet” applications such as Facebook widgets, social networking sites and Web 2.0 applications such as IPTV, VoIP and P2P file-sharing, to its Unified Security Gateway, which starts at $5,000.
* Data-leak prevention vendor Fidelis will announce $22 million in B round funding from Tudor Venture Partners and Point Judith Capital. Fidelis CEO Peter George says plans are to double the size of the Bethesda, Md.-based company, now at 30 employees, plus open offices in Boston as well as at a location to be determined in Europe. (Compare Data Leak Protection products.)
* Finjan is announcing the ninth version of its Vital Security Web appliances, adding what CTO Yuval Ben-Itzhak calls “active real-time content inspection” through a dashboard. Version 9.0 also includes Web 2.0 productivity-control modules using URL filtering engines from IBM and Websense. (Compare Secure Web Gateway products.)
* Great Bay Software is announcing a new software application called Sponsored Guest Access (SGA) that sets security parameters for guest users and contract employees in a NAC environment. As a supplement to NAC, SGA enables designating employees other than IT staff to authorize guest access, freeing up IT time. By limiting guests to restricted network segments, SGA can screen unmanaged devices that NAC platforms cannot because the devices lack NAC clients.
* Sterling Commerce, a division of AT&T, will unveil Sterling Secure Proxy, software that allows organizations to leverage the Internet for interactions with trading partners while maintaining security. The server-based software, which would typically reside within the DMZ to the Internet, allows managers to set policies to specify requirements for trading partners, such as mandating file encryption or multifactor authentication. According to Geoff Baird, vice president of the global product line, Sterling Secure Proxy, which starts at $15,000, reflects software designed for use inside the Sterling Commerce value-added network. “The benefit here is moving this outside the VAN as stand-alone software so customers can centrally manage security policies and check exceptions, since often you have to track files arriving at a certain time in e-commerce,” Baird says.
* VeriSign announces the “VIP test drive program” an initiative to encourage developers to use newly published VeriSign Web services APIs to hook into the company’s hosted infrastructure for authentication services. VeriSign’s VIP Authentication Services lets online businesses provide strong two-factor authentication to customers by using the VeriSign infrastructure.
The services lets customers make use of a single VeriSign credential with online businesses in the VeriSign program, such as PayPal and Schwab. In the latest twist, VeriSign says it will give the hardware tokens away free for use by businesses joining the program, which has a cost of between $7 and $10 per year for the service.
The RSA Conference will be the setting for over 200 security-presentation sessions, including those gathered under the new Research Revealed track. Speakers include Joanna Rutkowska, renowned researcher on virtualization and rootkits, from her firm Invisible Things Lab based in Poland.
Rutkowska indicates she plans to present new findings on nested rootkits and general security issues associated with virtualization. But Rutkowska, who has made headlines for two years running at Black Hat with her research on virtualized rootkits, expects more eye-popping work to debut at Black Hat this summer.
Others speaking on virtualization will include Steve Harrod, VMware’s CTO and vice president of research and development, on a panel with Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix Systems, about future trends.
