Start-up RedCannon shoots out Fireball

A new company called RedCannon is coming out this week with a security suite for Windows PCs that includes an IPSec VPN client. The start-up claims its product is interoperable with Check Point, NetScreen, Sonic Wall and Cisco VPN gateways.

The software, called Fireball CyberProtection Suite also includes a personal firewall, intrusion detection, content filtering, e-mail filtering and rudimentary system scanning.

The product can be used to create remote access VPNs with other vendors’ gateways and to make peer-to-peer connections with other machines that have Fireball loaded. A customer might want to use Fireball rather than the VPN client that comes with a gateway because it integrates all the other security features, which include making sure the host PC has the proper security settings before allowing a VPN tunnel to be set up.

The company says the software is intended for small businesses, and the lack of a management platform for it bears this out. The company’s founder and CEO Vimal Vaidya promises management software as well as a gateway of its own later this year.

Fireball is designed to monitor the activity of the operating system, the TCP/IP stack and applications on the host machine, perform Layer 7 decoding of the traffic and share that information among the security features. Vaidya says this minimizes the impact Fireball has on the host CPU. The company calls this architecture Surround Security Architecture or SSA, and is trying to get a patent on it.

At $49.95 the product is affordable, but at least initially, is suitable only for personal use or small offices. Fireball needs management tools and a server before it can break into the corporate world, which Vaidya says is one of RedCannon’s goals.