* Juniper is upgrading its NAC software
Juniper is upgrading its NAC software so it can share data with its Intrusion Detection and Prevention platform, giving it a type of post-admission NAC capability.
As the IDP gear gathers data about anomalous traffic behavior that may be malicious, it can share it with the Juniper Infranet Controller, the policy server for the company’s version of NAC, which is known as unified access control (UAC).
The Infranet Controller can then apply policies to take action against machines that are behaving badly. So if IDP picked up on a certain machine blasting out thousands of e-mails, for instance, that information would be shared with the Infranet Controller, which could quarantine the machine, end its session or simply log the event.
Operating alone, IDP drops malicious packets but doesn’t deal with their source.
This is a good addition to Juniper’s NAC offering, but it still restricts customers to using Juniper’s IDP. So far, UAC does not support IDP gear made by other vendors.
In its new software release, Juniper has chosen to support Microsoft Vista, at least in part. The upgraded software makes it possible to install the UAC client on a Vista machine in order to perform a pre-admission health check. However it does not support using the NAC support that comes standard with Vista. So customers of UAC must employ a UAC client or downloadable agent.
Juniper plans to support Vista as a UAC client next year.
The software release supports automatic remediation of some shortcomings UAC finds in Windows machines, such as starting up applications that must be running, or installing files or turning on processes that the policy calls for.
The new version of UAC software is available later this month.
