Secure Point Security Manager Suite

An easy to use package that actually let's you build your own firewall on a regular system of your choice as per your organization's need

Thursday, March 09, 2006

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We have covered many types of firewalls (both appliance and software based) in our previous issues. This time we are looking at a firewall, which can be used to actually create an appliance-based firewall. The Secure Point Security Manager Suite (henceforth referred to as Secure Point) is a Linux based firewall for an enterprise. This not only protects your network from external attacks, but also discards broadcast traffic, which is the main cause of network congestion leading to poor performance. You can download a trial copy of its latest version from http://securepoint.cc. This firewall is not only very easy to configure, but also has a built in proxy server and VPN configuration tool that allows you to protect your VPN links. Besides configuring the firewall from an admin machine, it can also be configured from a web browser over a secure port.

Secure Point requires a machine with at least 5 GB HDD, 128 MB RAM and two-network interfaces. Adding more RAM will give you better performance. For management of the Suite, you require a windows machine, installed with Secure Point Security Manager. This lets you configure and manage the firewall remotely. The firewall is based on Linux and has a client/server architecture that is very easy to setup. Besides the firewall, the Suite also gives you features such as a VPN, virus scanner and content filtering. Secure Point Security Solution runs on systems ranging from small devices up to large multi-processor systems utilizing gigabytes of memory. You can even configure the solution as a redundant high-availability system for automatic fail-over in case of hardware and network failures. In order to use the organizational bandwidth in an efficient way, the Suite has load-balancing capabilities. This feature helps improve performance and does traffic shaping, which in turn helps set priorities by network, service and protocol. 

The Firewall Setup Price
Secure Point comes as an ISO image, which can be burnt on a CD. This CD is used to boot a firewall machine, and you must have at least two network cards in the machine. The installation can be either text or graphics based. The graphics installation is simple enough and similar to setting up any other Linux firewall, but has a few exceptions. For one, it let's you choose a file system to use for the firewall installation, which can be either Ext2 or Raiserfs. If you have multiple hard drives installed on the system, it let's you activate Software RAID (Level 1 mirroring) for better fault tolerance. From here, it moves on to the usual process of selecting your network cards, defining the internal and external ones, assigning them IPs, etc. Then there's a separate step for defining the Global settings, wherein you specify name of the machine, gateway, IP address of the administrator computer on the internal network, etc. The rest of the process is automatic and takes about ten minutes.

Client Setup
One thing we liked about the firewall is that you have to configure a client machine specifically to manage the firewall. For this, you need a separate machine and install the Secure Point client on it. This client will then encrypt all the configuration files kept on the client and ask you to define a key for it. This ensures that nobody else can actually play around with it. From this interface, you can configure various aspects of the firewall, such as the rules, reports, etc.

Management
The good thing about this firewall is that it blocks all traffic by default. This ensures that even if you deploy the firewall, it's perfectly secure. You have to define each and every policy on the firewall, which includes defining the various computer groups on your network, including those in the DMZ (De-Militarized zone). We tested the firewall by flooding it with Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. The firewall was able to detect the DoS attack and subsequently, started dropping packets. We also ran the Nessus port scanner to find out whether the firewall had left any ports open. As we said initially, since all the ports were blocked by default, the attack was fruitless. The firewall discarded all broadcast traffic that was flooding the network, which is what a firewall should do.

Bottom line: We found this to be a pretty good firewall building software, as it let's you control each and every aspect of the firewall. Another thing that one should check is the support provided by the vendor, since it has to be purchased online.

Sanjay Majumder

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