* NetContinuum NC-1000 Application Security Gateway
One of the biggest concerns with exposing Web applications and services to the Internet is whether their security is adequate. Sure, if you start with a green field and a big enough budget, you can minimize your risk to the point of irrelevancy.
But what if you have neither a green field nor a big budget? If that is the case, you might check out the NetContinuum NC-1000 Application Security Gateway (see editorial links below). Netcontinuum also offers the NC-1000 Web Services Edition to address XML-based Web services.
Netcontinuum boasts that the NC-1000 is the “only product on the market to pass rigorous ICSA certification against all network and application layer threats.”
The specification of the product is indeed impressive: The Web application firewall provides bi-directional “deep inspection” of Web traffic including encrypted traffic and encoded content which allows enforcement of granular security policies.
The company claims that these inspection techniques can stop both known and unknown attacks including zero-day exploits.
The application firewall protection starts with “Web site Cloaking,” which hides the back-end application resources then enforces legitimate session behavior blocking any requests that do not conform. If you need even tighter security policies, you can set additional rules that can work at the URL, parameter, form field, and header levels.
An interesting feature is the ability of the NC-1000 to add SSL encryption with no changes to back-end applications or servers. The company cites the example of the product allowing browser access to the default home page of a Web site to be unencrypted while forcing access to all other pages to encrypted mode.
In addition, the “Instant SSL” encryption of the NC-1000 offloads all SSL processing from the servers removing what would otherwise be a processing overhead.
The NC-1000 Web Services Edition, a recently announced addition to the product, incorporates all of the features of the NC-1000 Application Security Gateway adding protection for XML Web services.
The company’s Data Theft Protection provides full shielding of sensitive data, such as credit cards, account numbers and driver’s license.
NetContinuum’s Web services protection provides Schema and Content Control to enforce protection from XML denial of service (XDoS) and input validation attacks through validation of specific XML/SOAP schemas or Document Type Definitions (DTD) used for the Web service defined within the Web Services Description Language (WSDL).
The NetContinuum NC-1000 Application Security Gateway costs $28,000 and the NC-1000 Application Security Gateway Web Services Edition, due in December, will cost $39,000.
