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When there’s smoke, there’s usually fire. I’ve been pretty vocal over the past two weeks, stating that users need to forget what they are hearing about various rumored acquisitions, or how these deals will impact them, and focus on doing their jobs. They can’t worry about what deal may or may not happen until it’s announced. Well, this morning HP announced the acquisition of ArcSight, after some more detailed speculation appeared over the weekend. So is it time to worry yet? Deal Rationale HP is acquiring ArcSight for about $1.5 billion, which is a significant premium over where ARST was trading before the speculation started. Turns out it’s about 8 times sales, which is a large multiple. Keep in mind that HP is a $120 billion revenue company, so spending a billion here and a billion there to drive growth is really a rounding error. What HP needs to do is buy established technology they can drive through their global channels and ARST clearly fits that bill. ARST has a large number of global enterprise customers who have spent millions of dollars and years making ARST’s SIEM platform work for them. Maybe not as well as they’d like, but it’s not something they can move away from any time soon. Throw in the double-digit growth characteristic of security and the accelerating cyber-security opportunity of ARST’s dominant position within government operations, and there is a lot of leverage for HP. Clearly HP is looking for growth drivers. Additionally, ARST requires a lot of services to drive implementation and expansion with the customer base. HP has lots of services folks they need to keep busy (EDS, anyone?), so there is further leverage. On the analyst call (on which, strangely enough, no one from ArcSight was present), the HP folks specifically mentioned how they plan to add value to customers from the intersection of software, services, and hardware. Right. This is all about owning everything and increasing their share of wallets. This is further explained by the 4 aspects of HP’s security strategy: Software Security (Fortify’s code scanning technology), Visibility (ArcSight comes in here), Understanding (risk assessment?, but this is hogwash), and Operations (TippingPoint and their IT Ops portfolio). This feels like a strategy built around the assets (as opposed to the strategy driving the product line), but clearly HP is committed to security, and that’s good to see. This feels a lot like HP’s Opsware deal a few years ago. ArcSight fits a gap in the IT management stack, and HP wrote a billion-dollar check to fill it. To be clear, HP still has gaps in their security strategy (perimeter and endpoint security) and will likely write more checks. Those deals will be considerably bigger and require considerably less services, which isn’t as attractive to HP, but in order to field a full security offering they need technology in all the major areas. Finally, this continues to validate our long term vision that security isn’t a market, it will be part of the larger IT stack. Clearly security management will be integrated with regular IT management, initially from a visibility standpoint, and gradually from an operations standpoint as well. Again, not within the next two years, but over a 5-7 year time frame. The big IT vendors need to provide security capabilities, and the only way they are going to get them is to buy. User Impact End user customers tend to make large (read: millions of dollars), multi-year investments in their SIEM/Log Management platforms. Those platforms are hard to rip out once implemented, so the technology tends to be quite sticky. The entire industry has been hearing about how unhappy customers are with SIEM players like ARST and RSA, but year after year customers spend more money with these companies to expand the use cases supported by the technology. There will be corporate integration challenges, and with these big deals product innovation tends to grind to a halt while these issues are addressed. We don’t expect anything different with HP/ARST. Inertia is a reality here. Customers have spent years and millions on ARST, so it’s hard to see a lot of them moving en masse elsewhere in the near term. Obviously if HP doesn’t integrate well, they’ll gradually see customers go elsewhere. If necessary, customers will fortify their ARST deployment with other technologies in the short term, and migrate when it’s feasible down the road. Regardless of the vendor propaganda you’ll hear about this customer swap-out or that one, it takes years for a big IT company to snuff out the life of an acquired technology. Not that both HP and IBM haven’t done that, but this simply isn’t a short-term issue. Should customers who are considering ArcSight look elsewhere? It really depends on what problem they are trying to solve. If it’s something that is well within ARST’s current capabilities (SIEM and Log Management), then there is little risk. If anything, having access to HP’s services arm will help in the intermediate term. If your use case requires ARST to build new capabilities or is based on product futures, you can likely forget it. Unless you want to pay HP’s services arm to build it for you. One of the hallmarks of the Pragmatic CSO approach is to view security within a business context. As we see traditional IT ops and security ops come together over time this becomes increasingly important. Security is critical to everything IT, but security is not a standalone and must be considered within the context of the full IT stack, which helps to automate business processes. The fact that many of security’s big vendors now live within huge IT behemoths is telling. Ignore the portents at your own peril. Market Impact We’ve been seeing a bifurcation of the SIEM/Log Management market over the past year. The strong are getting stronger and the not-so-strong are struggling. This will continue. The thing so striking about the EMC/RSA deal a couple years ago was the ability of EMC’s

The next step in our journey to understand and select an enterprise firewall has everything to do with management. During procurement it’s very easy to focus on shiny objects and blinking lights. By that we mean getting enamored with speeds, feeds, and features – to the exclusion of what you do with the device once it’s deployed. Without focusing on management during procurement, you may miss a key requirement – or even worse, sign yourself up to a virtual lifetime of inefficiency and wasted time struggling to manage the secure perimeter. To be clear, most of the base management capabilities of the firewall devices are subpar. In fact, a cottage industry of firewall management tools has emerged to address the gaps in these built-in capabilities. Unfortunately that doesn’t surprise us, because vendors tend to focus on managing their devices, rather than focusing on process of protecting the perimeter. There is a huge difference, and if you have more than 15-20 firewalls to worry about, you need to be very sensitive to how the rule base is built, distributed, and maintained. What to Manage? Let’s start by making a list of the things you tend to need to manage. It’s pretty straightforward and includes (but isn’t limited to): ports, protocols, users, applications, network access, network segmentation, and VPN access. You need to understand whether the rules will apply at all times or only at certain times. And whether the rules apply to all users or just certain groups of users. You’ll need to think about what behaviors are acceptable within specific applications as well – especially web-based apps. We talk about building these rule sets in detail in our Network Security Operations Quant research. Once we have lists of things to be managed, and some general acceptance of what the rules need to be (yes, that involves gaining consensus among business users, tech colleagues, legal, and lots of other folks there to make you miserable), you can configure the rule base and distribute to the boxes. Another key question is where you will manage the policy – or really at how many levels. You’ll likely have some corporate-wide policies driven from HQ which can’t be messed with by local admins. You can also opt for some level of regional administration, so part of the rule base reflects corporate policy but local administrators can add rules to deal with local issues. Given the sheer number of options available to manage an enterprise firewall environment, don’t forget to consider: Role-based access control: Make sure you get different classes of administrators. Some can manage the enterprise policy, others can just manage their local devices. You also need to pay attention to separation of duties, driven by the firewall change management workflow. Keep in mind the need to have some level of privileged user monitoring in place to keep everyone honest (and also to pass those pesky audits) and to provide an audit trail for any changes. Multi-domain administration: As the perimeter gets more complicated, we see a lot of focus around technologies to allow somewhat separate rule bases to be implemented on the firewalls. This doesn’t just provision for different administrators needing access to different functions on the devices, but supports different policies running on specific devices. Large enterprises with multiple operating units tend to have this issue, as each operation may have unique requirements which require different policy. Ultimately corporate headquarters bears responsibility for the integrity of the entire perimeter, so you’ll need a management environment that can effectively map to your the way your business operates. Virtual firewalls: Since everything eventually gets virtualized, why not the firewall? We aren’t talking about running the firewall in a virtual machine (we discussed that in the technical architecture post), but instead about having multiple virtual firewalls running on the same device. Depending on network segmentation and load balancing requirements, it may make sense to deploy totally separate rule sets within the same device. This is an emerging requirement but worth investigating, because supporting virtual firewalls isn’t easy with traditional hardware architectures. This may not be a firm requirement now, but could crop up in the future. Checking the Policy Those with experience managing firewalls know all about the pain of a faulty rule. To avoid that pain and learn from our mistakes, it’s critical to be able to test rules before they go live. That means the management tools must be able to tell you how a new rule or rule change impacts the rest of the rule base. For example, if you insert a rule at one point in the tree, does it obviate rules in other places? First and foremost, you want to ensure that any change doesn’t violate your policies or create a gaping hole in the perimeter. That is job #1. Also important is rule efficiency. Most organizations have firewall rule bases resembling old closets. Lots of stuff in there, and no one is quite sure why you keep this stuff or which rules still apply. So having the ability to check rule hits (how many times the rule was triggered) helps ensure all your rules remain relevant. It’s helpful to have a utility to help optimize the rule base. Since the rules tend to be checked sequentially for each incoming packet, making sure you’ve got the most frequently used rules early for maximum efficiency, so your expensive devices can work smarter rather than harder and provide some scalability headroom. But blind devotion to a policy tool is dangerous too. Remember, these tools simulate the policies and impact of new rules and updates. Don’t mistake simulation for reality – we strongly recommend confirming changes with actual tests. Maybe not every change, but periodically pen testing your own perimeter will make sure you didn’t miss anything, and minimize surprises. And we know you don’t like surprises. Reporting As interesting as managing the rule base is, at some point you’ll need to prove that you are doing the right thing. That means a set of reports substantiating the controls in place. You’ll want to be able to schedule

Now that we’ve been through technical architecture considerations for the evolving firewall (Part 1, Part 2), let’s talk about deployment considerations. Depending on requirements, there many different ways to deploy enterprise firewalls. Do this wrong and you end up with either too many or too few boxes, single points of failure, suboptimal network access, and/or crappy application performance. We could talk about all sorts of different models and use fancy names like tiered, mesh, peer to peer, and the like for them – but fortunately the situation isn’t really that complicated. To choose the most appropriate architecture you must answer a few questions: Public or Private Network? Are your remote locations all connected via private connections such as MPLS or managed IP services, or via public Internet services leveraging site-to-site VPN tunnels? How much is avoiding downtime worth? This fairly simple question will drive both network architecture and perimeter device selection. You can implement high availability architectures to minimize the likelihood of downtime but the cost is generally significant. What egress filtering/protection do you need? Obviously you want to provide web and email filtering on outbound traffic. Depending on bandwidth availability and cost, it may make sense to haul that back to a central location to be processed by large (existing) content security gateways. But for bandwidth-constrained sites it may make more sense to do web/email filtering locally (using a UTM box), with the understanding that filtering at the smaller sites might be less sophisticated. Who controls gateway policy? Depending on the size of your organization, there may be different policies for different geographies, business units, locations, etc. Some enterprise firewall management consoles support this kind of granular policy distribution, but you need to figure out who will control policy, and use this to guide how you deploy the boxes. Remember the technical architecture post where we pointed out the importance of consistency. A consistent feature set on devices up and down a vendor’s product line provides a lot of flexibility in how you can deploy – this enables you to select equipment based on the throughput requirement rather than feature set. This is also preferable because application architectures and requirements change, and support for all features on branch equipment (even if you don’t initially expect to use them) saves deploying new equipment remotely if you decide to take advantage of those features later, but we recognize this is not always possible. Economic reality rears its head every so often. Bandwidth Matters We most frequently see tiers of firewalls implemented in either two or three tiers. Central sites (geographic HQ) get big honking firewalls deployed in a high-availability cluster configuration to ensure resilience and throughput – especially if they provide higher-level application and/or UTM features. Distribution locations, if they exist, are typically connected to the central site via a private IP network. These tend to be major cities with good bandwidth. With plentiful bandwidth, most organizations tend to centralize egress filtering to minimize the control points, so outbound traffic tends to be centralized through the central site. With smaller locations like stores, or in emerging countries with expensive private network options, it may make more economic sense to use public IP services (commodity Internet access) with site-to-site VPN. In this case it’s likely not performance (or cost) effective to centralize egress filtering, so these firewalls generally must do the filtering as well. Regardless of the egress filtering strategy you should have a consistent set of ingress policies in place, which usually means (almost) no traffic originating from the Internet is accepted: a default deny security posture. Most organizations leverage hosting providers for web apps, which allow tight rules to be placed on the perimeter for inbound traffic. Likewise, allowing inbound Internet traffic to a small location usually doesn’t make sense, since those small sites shouldn’t be directly serving up data. Unless you are cool with tellers running their Internet-based side businesses on your network. High Availability Clusters Downtime is generally a bad thing – end users can get very grumpy when they can’t manage their fantasy football teams during the work day – so you should investigate the hardware resilience features of firewall devices. Things like hot swappable drives and power supplies, redundant backplanes, multiple network connections, redundant memory, etc. Obviously the more redundancy built into the box, the more it will cost, but you already knew that. Another option is to deploy a high availability cluster. Basically, this means you’ve got two (or more) boxes using sharing a single configuration, allowing automated and transparent load balancing between them to provide stable the performance and ride out any equipment failures. So if a box fails its peer(s) transparently pick up the slack. High availability and clustering used to be different capabilities (and on some older firewall architectures, still are). But given the state of the hardware and maturity of the space, the terminology has evolved to active/active (all boxes in the cluster process traffic) and active/passive (some boxes are normally hot spares, not processing traffic). Bandwidth requirements tend to drive whether multiple gateways are active, but the user-visible functioning is the same. Internal Deployment We have mostly discussed the perimeter gateway use case. But there is another scenario, where the firewall is deployed within the data center or at distribution points in the network, and provides network segmentation and filtering. This is a bit different than managing inbound/outbound traffic at the perimeter, and largely driven by network architecture. The bandwidth requirements for internal devices are intense – typically 40-100gbps and here downtime is definitely a no-no, so provision these devices accordingly and bring your checkbook. Migration The final issue we’ll tackle in relation to deployment is getting old boxes out and new boxes in. Depending on the size of the environment, it may not be feasible to do a flash cutover. So the more the new vendor can do to assist in the migration, the better. Fortunately the market is mature enough that many vendors can read in their competitors’

Tonight starts the Jewish New Year celebration – Rosh Hashanah. So L’Shana Tova to my Jewish peeps out there. I send my best wishes for a happy and healthy 5771. At this time of year, I usually go through my goals and take a step back to evaluate what I’ve accomplished and what I need to focus on for the next year. It’s a logical time to take stock of where I’m at. But as I’ve described, I’m moving toward a No Goal philosophy, which means the annual goal setting ritual must be jettisoned. So this year I’m doing things differently. As opposed to defining a set of goals I want to achieve over the next 12 months, which build towards my 3 and 10 year goals, I will lay down a set of ideals I want to live towards. Yeah, ideals seem so, uh, unachievable – but that’s OK. These are things that are important to my personal evolution. They are listed in no particular order: Be Kind: Truth be told, my default mode is to be unkind. I’m cynical, snarky, and generally lacking in empathy. I’m not a sociopath or anything, but I also have to think consciously to say or do something nice. Despite that realization, I’m not going to stop speaking my mind, nor will I shy away from saying what has to be said. I’ll just try to do it in a nicer way. I realize some folks will continue to think I’m an ass, and I’m OK with that. As long as I go about being an ass in the right way. Be Active: As I’ve mentioned, I don’t really take a lot of time to focus on my achievements. But my brother was over last week, and he saw a picture from about 5 years ago, and I was rather portly. Since that time I’ve lost over 60 pounds and am probably in the best shape I’ve been since I graduated college. The key for me is activity. I need to work out 5-6 times a week, hard. This year I’ve significantly increased the intensity of my workouts and subsequently dropped 20 pounds, and am finally within a healthy range of all the stupid actuarial tables. No matter how busy I get with all that important stuff, I need to remain active. Be Present: Yeah, I know it sounds all new age and lame, but it’s true. I need to appreciate what I’m doing when I’m doing it, not focus on the next thing on the list. I need to stay focused on the right now, not what screwed up or what might (or might not) happen. Easier said than done, but critical to making the most of every day. As Master Oogway said in Kung Fu Panda: You are too concerned about what was and what will be. There is a saying: yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the ‘present’. Focus on My Problems: I’ve always been way too focused on being right. Especially when it doesn’t matter. It made me grumpy. I need to focus on the things that I can control, where I can have an impact. That means I won’t be so wrapped up in trying to get other people to do what I think they should. I can certainly offer my opinion, and probably will, but I can’t take it personally when they ignore me. After all, if I don’t control it, I can’t take ownership of it, and thus it’s not my problem. Sure that’s a bit uncaring, but if I let someone else’s actions dictate whether I’m happy or not, that gives them way too much power. Accept Imperfection: Will I get there? Not every day. Probably not most days. But my final ideal is to realize that I’m going to continue screwing things up. A lot. I need to be OK with that and move on. Again, the longer I hold onto setbacks and small failures, the longer it will take me to get to the next success or achievement. This also applies to the folks I interact with, like my family and business partners. We all screw up. Making someone feel bad about it is stupid and counterproductive. Yes, this is a tall order. Now that I’m paying attention, over the past few days I’ve largely failed to live up to these ideals. Imperfect I am, that’s for sure. But I’m going to keep trying. Every day. And that’s my plan for the New Year. – Mike. Photo credits: “Self Help” originally uploaded by hagner_james Recent Securosis Posts With Rich being out on paternity leave (for a couple more days anyway), activity on the blog has been a bit slower than normal. But that said, we are in the midst of quite a few research projects. I’ll start posting the NSO Quant metrics this week, and will be continuing the Enterprise Firewall series. We’re also starting a new series on advanced security monitoring next week. So be patient during the rest of this holiday week, and we’ll resume beating you senseless with loads of content next week… FireStarter: Market for Lemons Friday Summary: September 3, 2010 White Paper Released: Understanding and Selecting SIEM/Log Management Understanding and Selecting an Enterprise Firewall: Application Awareness, Part 1 Application Awareness, Part 2 LiquidMatrix Security Briefing: August 25 September 1 September 2 Incite 4 U We’re from the Government, and we’re here to help… – Yes, that sentence will make almost anyone cringe. But that’s one of the points Richard Clarke is making on his latest book tour. Hat tip to Richard Bejtlich for excerpting some interesting tidbits from the interview. Should the government have the responsibility to inform companies when they’ve been hacked? I don’t buy it. I do think we systematically have to share data more effectively and make a concerted effort to benchmark our security activities and results. And yes, I know that is

In the first part of our Enterprise Firewall technical discussion, we talked about the architectural changes required to support this application awareness stuff. But the reality is most of the propaganda pushed by the firewall vendors still revolves around speeds and feeds. Of course, in the hands of savvy marketeers (in mature markets), it seems less than 10gbps magically becomes 40gbps, 20gbps becomes 100gbps, and software on an industry-standard blade becomes a purpose-built appliance. No wonder buying anything in security remains such a confusing and agonizing endeavor. So let’s cut through the crap and focus on what you really need to know. Scalability In a market dominated by what I’ll call lovingly “bit haulers” (networking companies), everything gets back to throughput and performance. And to be clear throughput is important – especially depending on how you want to deploy the box and what security capabilities you want to implement. But you also need to be very wary of the religious connotations of a speeds and feeds discussion, so be able to wade through the cesspool without getting lost, and determine the best fit for your environment. Here are a few things to consider: Top Speed: Most of the vendors want to talk about the peak throughput of their devices. In fact many pricing models are based on this number – which is useless to most organizations in practice. You see, a 100gbps firewall under the right circumstances can process 100gbps. But turn anything on – like more than two filtering rules, or application policies, or identity integration, and you’ll be lucky to get a fraction of the specified throughput. So it’s far more important to understand your requirements, which will then give you a feel for the real-world top speed you require. And during the testing phase you’ll be able to ensure the device can keep up. Proprietary or industry-standard hardware: Two camps exist in the enterprise firewall market: those who spin their own chips and those who don’t. The chip folks have all these cool pictures that show how their proprietary chips enable all sorts of cool things. On the other hand, the guys who focus on software tell stories about how they take advantage of cool hardware technologies in industry-standard chips (read: Intel processors). This is mostly just religious/PR banter, and not very relevant to your decision process. The fact is, you are buying an enterprise firewall, which needs to be a perimeter gateway solution. How it’s packaged and who makes the chips don’t really matter. The real question is whether the device will provide the services you need at the speed your require. There is no place for religion in buying security devices. UTM: Many of the players in this space talk about their ability to add capabilities such as IDS/IPS and content security to their devices. Again, if you are buying a firewall, buy a firewall. In an enterprise deployment, turning on these additional capabilities may kill the performance of a firewall, which kind of defeats the purpose of buying an evolved firewall. That said there are clearly use cases where UTM is a consideration (especially smaller/branch offices) and having that capability can swing the decision. The point here is to first and foremost make sure you can meet your firewall requirements, and keep in mind that additional UTM features may not be important to the enterprise firewall decision. Networking functions: A major part of the firewall’s role is to be a traffic cop for both ingress and egress traffic passing through the device. So it’s important that your device can run at the speeds required for the use case. If the plan is to deploy the device in the data center to segment credit card data, then playing nice with the switching infrastructure (VLANs, etc.) is key. If the device is to be deployed on the perimeter, how well it plays with the IP addressing environment (network address translation) and perhaps bandwidth rate limiting capabilities are important. Are these features that will make or break your decision? Probably not, but if your network is a mess (you are free to call it ‘special’ or ‘unique’), then good interoperability with the network vendor is important, and may drive you toward security devices offered by your primary network vendor. So it’s critical that in the initial stage of the procurement process you are very clear about what you are buying and why. If it’s a firewall, that’s great. If it needs some firewall capabilities plus other stuff, that’s great too. But figure this out, because it shapes the way you make this decision. Product Line Consistency Given the significant consolidation that has happened in the network security business over the past 5 years, another aspect of the technical architecture is product line consistency. By that, we mean to what degree to the devices within a vendor’s product line offer the same capabilities and user experience. In an enterprise rollout you’ll likely deploy a range different-sized devices, depending on location and which capabilities each deployment requires. Usually we don’t much care about the underlying guts and code base these devices use, because we buy solutions to problems. But we do have to understand and ask whether the same capabilities are available up and down the product line, from the small boxes that go in branches to the big box sitting at HQ. Why? Because successfully managing these devices requires enforcing a consistent policy across the enterprise, and that’s hard if you have different devices with different capabilities and management requirements. We also need to mention the v-word – virtualization. A lot of the vendors (especially the ones praying to the software god) offer their firewalls as virtual appliances. If you can get past the idea that the anchor of your secure perimeter will be abstracted and run under a hypervisor, this opens up a variety of deployment alternatives. But again, you need to ensure that a consistent policy can be implemented, the user experience is the same, and

In the first part of our series on Understanding and Selecting an Enterprise Firewall, we talked mostly about use cases and new requirements (Introduction, Application Awareness Part 1, and Part 2) driving a fundamental re-architecting of the perimeter gateway. Now we need to dig into the technical goodies that enable this enhanced functionality and that’s what the next two posts are about. We aren’t going to rehash the history of the firewall – that’s what Wikipedia is for. Suffice it to say the firewall started with application proxies, which led to stateful inspection, which was supplemented with deep packet inspection. Now every vendor has a different way of talking about their ability to look into packet streams moving through the gateway, but fundamentally they’re not all that different. Our main contention is that application awareness (building policies and rules based on how users interact with applications) isn’t something that fits well into the existing firewall architecture. Why? Basically, the current technology (stateful + deep packet inspection) is still focused on ports and protocols. Yes, there are some things (like bolting an IPS onto the firewall) that can provide some rudimentary application support, but ultimately we believe the existing firewall architecture is on its last legs. Packet Processing Evolves So what is the difference between what we see now and what we need? Basically it’s about the number of steps to enforce an application-oriented rule. Current technology can identify the application, but then needs to map it to the existing hierarchy of ports/protocols. Although this all happens behind the scenes, doing all this mapping in real time at gigabit speeds is very resource intensive. Clearly it’s possible to throw hardware at the problem, and at lower speeds that’s fine. But it’s not going to work forever. The long term answer is a brain transplant for the firewall, and we are seeing numerous companies adopting a new architecture based not on ports/protocols, but on specific applications and identities. So once the application is identified, rules can be applied directly to the application or to the user/group for that application. State is now managed for the specific application (or user/group). No mapping, no performance hit. Again, at lower speeds it’ll be hard to decipher which architecture a specific vendor is using, but turn on a bunch of application rules and crank up the bandwidth, and old architectures will come grinding to a stop. And the only way to figure it out for your specific traffic is to actually test it, but that’s getting a bit ahead of ourselves. We’ll talk about that at the end of the series when we discuss procurement. Application Profiles For a long time, security research was the purview of the anti-virus vendors, vulnerability management folks, and the IDS/IPS guys. They had to worry about these “signatures,” which were basically profiles of bad things. Their devices enforce policies by looking for bad stuff: a typical negative security model. This new firewall architecture allows rules to be set up to look only for the good applications, and to block everything else. A positive security model makes a lot more sense strategically. We cannot continue looking for, identifying, and enumerating bad stuff because there is an infinite amount of it, but the number of good things that are specifically authorized is much more manageable. We should mention this does overlap a bit with typical IPS behavior (in terms of blocking stuff that isn’t good), and clearly there will be increasing rationalization of these functions on the perimeter gateway. In order to make this architecture work, the application profiles (how you recognize application one vs. application two) must be correct. If you thought bad IPS rules wreak havoc (false positives, blocked traffic, & general chaos), wait until you implement a screwy firewall application profile. So as we have mentioned numerous times in the Network Security Operations Quant series on Managing Firewalls, testing these profiles and rules multiple times before deploying is critical. It also means firewall vendors need to make a significant and ongoing investment in application research, because many of these applications will be deliberately difficult to identify. With a variety of port hopping and obfuscation techniques being used even by the good guys (to enhance performance mostly, but also to work through firewalls), digging deeply into a vendor’s application research capabilities will be a big part of choosing between these devices. We also expect open interfaces from the vendors to allow enterprise customers to build their own application profiles. As much as we’d like to think all of our applications are all web-friendly and stuff, not so much. So in order to truly support all applications, customers will need to be able to build and test their own profiles. Identity Integration Take everything we just said about applications and apply it to identity. Just as we need to be able to identify applications and apply certain rules to those application behaviors, we need to apply those rules to specific users and groups as well. That means integration with the dominant identity stores (Active Directory, LDAP, RADIUS, etc.) becomes very important. Do you really need real-time identity sync? Probably not. Obviously if your organization has lots of moves/adds/changes and those activities need to impact real-time access control, then the sync window should be minutes rather than hours. But for most organizations, a couple hours should suffice. Just keep in mind that syncing with the firewall is likely not the bottleneck in your identity management process. Most organizations have a significant lag (a day, if not multiple days) between when a personnel change happens and when it filters through to the directories and other application access control technologies. Management Evolution As we described in the Application Awareness posts, thinking in terms of applications and users – rather than ports and protocols – can add significantly to the complexity of setting up and maintaining the rule base. So enterprise firewalls leveraging this new architecture need to bring forward enhanced management capabilities. Cool application

In our last post on application awareness as a key driver for firewall evolution, we talked about the need and use cases for advanced firewall technologies. Now let’s talk a bit about some of the challenges and overlap of this kind of technology. Whether you want to call it disruptive or innovative or something else, introducing new capabilities on existing gear tends to have a ripple effect on everything else. Application awareness on the firewall is no exception. So let’s run through the other security devices usually present on your perimeter and get a feel for whether these newfangled firewalls can replace and supplant, or just supplement, these other devices. Clearly you want to simplify the perimeter where you can, and part of that is reducing the device footprint. IDS/IPS: Are application aware firewalls a threat to IDS/IPS? In a nutshell, yes. In fact, as we’ll see when we examine technical architectures, a lot of the application aware firewalls actually use an IPS engine under the covers to provide application support. In the short term, the granularity and maturity of IPS rules mean you probably aren’t turning IPSes off, yet. But over time, the ability to profile applications and enforce a positive security model definitely will impinge on what a traditional IDS/IPS brings to the table. Web application firewall (WAF): Clearly being able to detect malformed web requests and other simple attacks is possible on an application aware firewall. But providing complete granular web application defenses, such as automated profiling of web application traffic and specific application calls (as a WAF does) are not as easily duplicated via the vendor-delivered application libraries/profiles, so we still see a role for the WAF to protect inbound traffic directed at critical web apps. But over time it looks pretty certain that these granular capabilities will show up in application aware firewalls. Secure Email Gateway: Most email security architectures today involve a two-stage process of getting rid of the spammiest email using reputation and connection blocking, before doing in-depth filtering and analysis of message content. We clearly see a role for the application aware firewall to provide reputation and connection blocking for inbound email traffic, but believe it will be hard to duplicate the kind content of analysis present on email security gateways. That said, end users increasingly turn to service providers for anti-spam capabilities, so over time this feature is decreasing in importance for the perimeter gateway. Web Filters: In terms of capabilities, there is a tremendous amount of overlap between the application aware firewall and web filtering gateways. Obviously web filters have gone well beyond simple URL filtering, which is already implemented on pretty much all firewalls. But some of the advanced heuristics and visibility aspects of the web security gateways are not particularly novel, so we expect significant consolidation of these devices into the application aware firewall over the next 18 months or so. Ultimately the role of the firewall in the short and intermediate term is going to be as the coarse filter sitting in front of many of these specialized devices. Over time, as customers get more comfortable with the overlap (and realize they may not need all the capabilities on the specialized boxes), we’ll start to see significant cannibalization on the perimeter. That said, most of the vendors moving towards application aware firewalls already have many of these devices in their product lines. So it’s likely about neutral to the vendor whether IPS capabilities are implemented on the perimeter gateway or a device sitting behind the gateway. Complexity is not your friend Yes, these new devices add a lot of flexibility and capabilities in terms of how you protect your perimeter devices. But with that flexibility comes potentially significant complexity. With your current rule base probably numbering in the thousands of rules, think about how many more you’d need to set up rules to control specific applications. And then to control how specific groups use specific applications. Right, it’s mind numbing. And you’ll also have to revisit these policies far more frequently, since apps are always changing and thus enforcing acceptable behavior may also need to change. Don’t forget the issues around keeping application support up to date, either. It’s a monumental task for the vendor to constantly profile important applications, understand how they work, and be able to detect the traffic as it passes through the gateway. This kind of endeavor never ends because the applications are always changing. There are new applications being implemented and existing apps change under the covers – which impacts protocols and interactions. So one of the key considerations in choosing an application aware firewall is comfort with the vendor’s ability to stay on top of the latest application trends. The last thing you want is to either lose visibility or not be able to enforce policies because Twitter changed their authentication process (which they recently did). It kinds of defeats the purpose of having an application aware firewall in the first place. All this potential complexity means application blocking technology still isn’t simple enough to use for widespread deployment. But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be playing with these devices or thinking about how leveraging application visibility and blocking can bolster existing defenses for well known applications. It’s really more about figuring out how to gracefully introduce the technology without totally screwing up the existing security posture. We’ll talk a lot more about that when we get to deployment considerations. Next we’ll talk about the underlying technology driving the enterprise firewall. And most importantly, how it’s changing to enable increased speed, integration, and application awareness. To say these devices are receiving brain transplants probably isn’t too much of an exaggeration.   Share:

As mentioned in the Introduction to Understanding and Selecting an Enterprise Firewall, we see three main forces driving firewall evolution. The first two are pretty straightforward and don’t require a lot of explanation or debate: networks are getting faster and thus the perimeter gateways need to get faster. That’s not brain surgery. Most end users have also been dealing with significant perimeter security sprawl, meaning where they once had a firewall they now have 4-5 separate devices, and they are looking for integrated capabilities. Depending on performance requirements, organizational separation of duties, and good old fashioned politics, some enterprises are more receptive than others to integrated gateway devices (yes, UTM-like things). Less devices = less complexity = less management angst = happier customers. Again, not brain surgery. But those really just fall into the category of bigger and faster, not really different. The one aspect of perimeter protection we see truly changing is the need for these devices to become application aware. That means you want policies and rules based on not just port, protocol, source, destination, and time – but also on applications and perhaps even specific activities within an application. This one concept will drive a total overhaul of the enterprise perimeter. Not today and not tomorrow – regardless of vendor propaganda to the contrary – but certainly over a 5 year period. I can’t remember the source of the quote, but it goes something like “we overestimate progress over a 1-2 year period, but usually significantly underestimate progress over a 10 year period.” We believe that is true for application awareness within our network security devices. Blind Boxes and Postmen Back when I was in the email security space, we used a pretty simple metaphor to describe the need for an anti-spam appliance. Think about the security guards in a typical large enterprise. They are sitting in the lobby, looking for things that don’t belong. That’s kind of your firewall. But think about the postman, who shows up every day with a stack of mail. That’s port 25 traffic (SMTP). Well, the firewall says, “Hey Mr. Postman, come right in,” regardless of what is in the mail bin. Most of the time that’s fine, but sometimes a package is ticking and the security guard will miss it. So the firewall is blind to what happens within port 25. Now replace port 25 with port 80 (or 443), which represents web traffic, and you are in the same boat. Your security guard (firewall) expects that traffic, so it goes right on through. Regardless of what is in the payload. And application developers know that, so it’s much easier to just encapsulate application-specific data and/or protocols within port 80 so they can go through most firewalls. On the other hand, that makes your firewall blind to most of the traffic coming through it. As a bat. That’s why most folks aren’t so interested in firewall technology any more. It’s basically a traffic cop, telling you where you can go, but not necessarily protecting much of anything. This has driven web application firewalls, web filters, email gateways, and even IDS/IPS devices to sit behind the firewall to actually protect things. Not the most efficient way to do things. This is also problematic for one of the key fundamentals of network security – Default Deny. That involves rejecting all traffic that is not explicitly allowed. Obviously you can’t block port 80, which is why so many things use port 80 – to get that free ride around default deny policies. So that’s the background for why application awareness is important. Now let’s get into some tangible use cases to further illuminate the importance of this capability. Use Case: Visibility Do you know what’s running on your networks? Yeah, we know that’s a loaded question, but most network/security folks don’t. They may lie about it, and some actually do a decent job of monitoring, but most don’t. They have no idea the CFO is watching stuff he shouldn’t be. They have no idea the junior developer is running a social network off the high-powered workstation under his desk. They also don’t know the head of engineering is sending critical intellectual property to an FTP server outside the country. Well, they don’t know until it’s too late. So one of the key drivers for application awareness is visibility. We’ve seen this before, haven’t we? Remember how web filters were first positioned? Right, as employee productivity tools – not security devices. It was about making sure employees weren’t violating acceptable use policies. Only afterwards did folks realize how much bad stuff is out there on the web that should be blocked. In terms of visibility, you want to know not just how much of your outbound traffic is Facebook, or how much of your inbound traffic is from China, or from a business partner. You want to know what Mike Rothman is doing at any given time. And how many folks (and from where) are hitting your key Intranet site through the VPN. The questions are endless once you can actually peek into port 80 and really understand what is happening. And alert on it. Cool, right? The possibility for serious eye candy is also attractive. We all know senior management likes pie charts. This kind of visibility enables some pretty cool pie charts. You can pinpoint exactly what folks are doing on both ingress and egress connections, and isolate issues that cause performance and security problems. Did I mention that senior management likes pie charts? Use Case: Blocking As described above, the firewall doesn’t really block sophisticated attacks nowadays because it’s blind to the protocols comprising the bulk of inbound and outbound traffic. OK, maybe that’s a bit of a harsh overgeneralization, but it certainly doesn’t block what we need it to block. We rely on other devices (WAF, web filter, email security gateway, IPS) to do the blocking. Mostly via a negative security model, meaning you are looking for specific examples of

Hard to believe it’s September already. As we steam through yet another year, I like to step back and reflect on the technical achievements that have literally changed our life experience. Things like the remote control and pay at the pump. How about the cell phone, which is giving way to a mini-computer that I carry in my pocket? Thankfully it’s much lighter than a PDP-11. And networks, yeah man, always on baby! No matter where you are, you can be connected. But let’s not forget the wonders of silicone and injection molding, which has enabled the phenomena known as Silly Bandz. Ugh. My house has been taken over by these God-forsaken things. My kids are obsessed with collecting and trading the Bandz and it’s spread to all their friends. When I would drive car pool to camp, the kids would be trading one peace monkey for a tie-dye SpongeBob. Bandz are available for most popular brands (Marvel, Disney, even Justin Bieber – really), as well as sports teams, and pretty much anything else. Best of all, the Silly Bandz are relatively cheap. You get like 24 for $5. Not like stupid Jibbitz. Of which, you could only put maybe 5 or 6 Jibbitz on a Croc. The kids can wear hundreds of these Bandz. My son is trying to be like Mr. T with all the Bandz on his arm at any given time. I know this silliness will pass and then it will be time for another fad. But we’ve got a ways to go. It got a bit crazy a week ago, when we were preparing for the Boy’s upcoming birthday party. Of course he’s having a Silly Bandz party. So I’ll have a dozen 7 years olds in my basement trading these damn things for 2 hours. And to add insult to injury, the Boss scheduled the party on top of NFL opening weekend. Yeah, kill me now. Thank heavens for my DVR. Evidently monkey bandz are very scarce, so when the family found a distributor and could buy a couple of boxes on eBay, we had to move fast. That should have been my first warning sign. But I played along a bit. I even found some humor as the Boy gets into my wife’s grill and told her to focus because she wasn’t moving fast enough. There was only 30 minutes left in the eBay auction. Of course, I control the eBay/PayPal account, so they send me the link that has an allegedly well-regarded seller and the monkey bandz. I dutifully take care of the transaction and hit submit. Then the Boy comes running downstairs to tell me to stop. Uh, too late. Transaction already submitted. It seems the Boss was deceived that the seller had a lot of positive feedback but only as a buyer. Right, this person bought a lot of crap (and evidently paid in a timely fashion), but hadn’t sold anything yet. Oh crap. So they found another seller, but I put my foot down. If we got screwed on the transaction, it was too bad. They got crazy about getting the monkey bandz right then and now they will live with the decision. Even if it means we get screwed on the transaction. So the kids were on pins and needles for 5 days. Running to the mailbox. Wondering if the Postman would bring the treasure trove of monkey bandz. On the 6th day, the bands showed up. And there was happiness and rejoicing. But I didn’t lose the opportunity to teach the kids about seller reputation on sites like eBay and also discuss how some of the scams happen and why it’s important to not get crazy over fads like Silly Bandz. And I could literally see my words going in one ear and out the other. They were too smitten with monkey bandz to think about transaction security and seller reputation. Oh joy. I wonder what the next fad will be? I’m sure I’ll hate it, and yes, now I’m the guy telling everyone to get off my lawn. – Mike. Note: Congrats to Rich and Sharon Mogull upon welcoming a new baby girl to the world yesterday (Aug 31). Everyone is healthy and it’s great to expand the Securosis farm team a bit more. We’ll have the new one writing the FireStarter next week, so stay tuned for that. Photo credits: “Silly Bandz” originally uploaded by smilla4 Recent Securosis Posts This week we opened up the NSO Quant survey. Please take a few minutes to give us a feel for how you monitor and manage your network security devices. And you can even win an iPad… Also note that we’ve started posting the LiquidMatrix Security Digest whenever our pals Dave, James, and team get it done. I know you folks will appreciate being kept up on the latest security links. We are aware there were some issues of multiple postings. Please bear with us as we work out the kinks. Home Security Alarm Tips Have DLP Questions or Feedback? Want Free Answers? Friday Summary: August 27, 2010 White Paper Released: Understanding and Selecting SIEM/Log Management Data Encryption for PCI 101 posts: Supporting Systems Selection Criteria Understand and Selecting an Enterprise Firewall: Introduction LiquidMatrix Security Briefing: August 25 August 30 August 31 Incite 4 U PCI-Compliant clouds? Really? – The Hoff got into fighting mode before his trip out to VMWorld by poking a bit at a Verizon press release talking about their PCI Compliant Cloud Computing Solution. Despite attending the inaugural meeting of the ATL chapter of the Cloud Security Alliance yesterday, I’m still a bit foggy about this whole cloud thing. I’m sure Rich will explain it to me in between diapers. Hoff points out the real issue, which is defining what is in scope for the PCI assessment. That makes all the difference. To be clear, this won’t be the last service provider claiming cloud PCI compliance, so it’s important to understand what that

Today we begin the our next blog series: Understanding and Selecting an Enterprise Firewall. Yes, really. Shock was the first reaction from most folks. They figure firewalls have evolved about as much over the last 5 years as ant traps. They’re wrong, of course, but most people think of firewalls as old, static, and generally uninteresting. In fact, most security folks begin their indentured servitude looking after the firewalls, where they gain seasoning before anyone lets them touch important gear like the IPS. As you’ll see over the next few weeks, there’s definitely activity on the firewall front which can and should impact your perimeter architecture and selection process. That doesn’t mean we will be advocating yet another rip and replace job on your perimeter (sorry vendors), but there are definitely new capabilities that warrant consideration, especially as the maintenance renewals come due. To state the obvious, the firewall tends to be the anchor of the enterprise perimeter, protecting your network from most of the badness out there on the Intertubes. We do see some use of internal firewalling, driven mostly by network segmentation. Pesky regulations like PCI mandate that private data is at a minimum logically segmented from non-private data, so some organizations use firewalls to keep their in scope systems separate from the rest, although most organizations use network-level technologies to implement their segmentation. In the security market, firewalls resides in the must have category along with anti-virus (AV). I’m sure there are organizations that don’t use firewalls to protect their Internet connections, but I have yet to come across one. I guess they are the same companies that give you that blank, vacant stare when you ask if it was a conscious choice not to use AV. The prevalence of the technology means we see a huge range of price points and capabilities among firewalls. Consumer uses aside, firewalls range in price from about $750 to over $250,000. Yes, you can spend a quarter of a million dollars on a firewall. It’s not easy, but you can do it. Obviously there is a huge difference between the low end boxes protecting branch and remote offices and the gear protecting the innards of a service provider’s network, but ultimately the devices do the same thing. Protect one network from another based on a defined set of rules. For this series we are dealing with the enterprise firewall, which is designed for use in larger organizations (2,500+ employees). That doesn’t mean our research won’t be applicable to smaller companies, but enterprise is the focus. From an innovation standpoint, not much happened on firewalls for a long time. But three major trends have hit and are forcing a general re-architecting of firewalls: Performance/Scale: Networks aren’t getting slower and that means the perimeter must keep pace. Where Internet connections used to be sold in multiples of T1 speed, now we see speeds in the hundreds of megabits/sec or gigabits/sec, and to support internal network segmentation and carrier uses these devices need to scale to and past 10gbps. This is driving new technical architectures to better utilizing advanced packet processing and silicon. Integration: Most network perimeters have evolved along with the threats. That means the firewall/VPN is there, along with an IPS, but also an anti-spam gateway, web filter, web application firewall, and probably 3-4 other types of devices. Yeah, this perimeter sprawl creates a management nightmare, so there has been a drive for integration of some of these capabilities into a single device. Most likely it’s firewall and IDS/IPS, but there is clearly increasing interest in broader integration (UTM: unified threat management) even at the high end of the market. This is also driving new technical architectures because moving beyond port/protocol filtering seriously taxes the devices. Application Awareness: It seems everything nowadays gets encapsulated into port 80. That means your firewall makes like three blind mice for a large portion of your traffic, which is clearly problematic. This has resulted in much of the perimeter sprawl described above. But through the magic of Moore’s law and some savvy integration of some IPS-like capabilities, the firewall can enforce rules on specific applications. This climbing of the stack by the firewall will have a dramatic impact on not just firewalls, but also IDS/IPS, web filters, WAFs, and network-layer DLP before it’s over. We will dig very deeply into this topic, so I’ll leave it at that for now. So it’s time to revisit how we select an enterprise firewall. In the next few posts we’ll look at this need for application awareness by digging into use cases for application-centric rules before we jump into technical architectures.   Share: