Features

The U.are.U Pro for Active Directory from Digital Persona is, as its name suggests, a product to bring biometric identity verification to a Windows Active Directory environment (including Windows Server 2003). It may be fully integrated at server level or used on a standalone workstation.

Now in version 3.6, the Tsunami VPN appliance sports a simpler management interface and new tools for managing access rules, as well as the ability to send password expiration warnings to remote users who authenticate against NT domains.

This product is built upon Sun's very secure Trusted Solaris 8 operating system, which has been used by the U.S. Department of Defense for over 25 years. It is a hardened version of the Solaris operating system platform for deployment of high-security desktops, database servers, firewalls, and communication gateways.

Many companies are looking to secure their networks from wardriving attacks and the current advice is to put a VPN behind a wireless access point. With this in mind, the following product should be ideal. The aim of the product is to secure access to network infrastructure from wireless clients using the wireless transport layer security (WTLS) protocol, which is a wireless version of SSL.

The NEC TouchPass system will appeal to systems administrators looking to integrate biometric verification into the organizational network access security routines.

This appliance hails from a Swedish company that has been going since 1997. The software runs on a Sun Netra X1 box (1U in size). It also has the widest range of client types we saw in this test.

Aventail was probably the first company to conceive and market the idea of the clientless SSL VPN. However it has only recently brought out its own hardware appliance that does such a job.

This box is one of the smallest in this Group Test but it managed to punch above its weight. It has most of the features that the bigger boxes have, but for a smaller price tag - good news for any business on a tight budget.

An ingenious little device from Meganet Corporation to enable secure portable data storage, the USB token incorporates a fingerprint biometric sensor and a simple interface of 3 LEDs to inform the user of status.

Guardware produces a variety of innovative products, all of which have been well received. It was interesting, therefore, to see a keyboard product with integral fingerprint reader from this Hungarian company (although the keyboard is actually made in China).

The SafeGuard Biometrics product is straightforward in concept and execution, making use of smartcard and biometric technology to provide strong identity verification for workstation and network access, as well as making the same functionality available to other services such as email clients and the use of certificates.

The Instant Virtual Extranet (IVE) Access 3000 from Neoteris is a hardware/software hybrid SSL VPN appliance that offers users access to network resources securely. These resources also encompass web-enabled applications and email software (Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange), as well as Unix file shares.

Computer Associates eTrust Antivirus is part of the eTrust security product family that has build its reputation on usability, detection, disinfection and the quality of support expected of any best-of-breed security solution. It provides its users with regular updates for ongoing protection, offering both virus antidotes and signature files to keep the user one step ahead. If you are looking for an anti-virus solution that protects both the server environment and the workstation, with more than adequate protection for a typical SME and the larger corporation alike, then eTrust Antivirus is well worth consideration. Installation of the eTrust Antivirus solution is flexible, it can either be achieved remotely or by local means, so depending on the size of your enterprise you can determine which offers the best option when you are ready to install it.

Preventon Secure Internet Desktop or PSID for short, is an amalgam of all of the company's products in a multi-function suite. The software is available in two versions - an ISP edition that relies upon the subscription service for ISPs in order to maintain, update and interact with the client software on the user's desktop, and a desktop version that functions on a standalone basis. The ISP version of the Personal Firewall PRO is already available to subscribers of Planet Internet in the Netherlands, at a subscription price of just over a pound a month (€1.95) and other ISPs are expected to sign up to the service in due course.

As any security administrator knows, the only thing as bad as not enough information is too much. Staying on top of the overwhelming flood of information from every device is a difficult job. Information comes in as events, alerts, notifications of changes or just status updates. Making sense of it all requires efficient correlation tools, like the Network Intelligence logging appliances.
Network Intelligence sent us the HA 2000, the smallest version of its enterprise-class product suite, fitting in between the EX series targeting SMEs, and the LS series for large environments. The system runs Windows 2000 Server in a 2U rack-mount chassis. The HA 2000 is licensed to handle a maximum of 2,000 events per second (EPS), from a maximum of 64 information sources. There are several larger versions available (chiefly a matter of licensing, although at 4,000 EPS the devices start shipping with more on-board disk and memory), up to 6,000 EPS, for monitoring up to 1,024 network devices. And they can be clustered, up to three units together for triple the throughput.

Mail-Lock falls into a new category of email protection software, which the vendor calls email personal information containment, or EPIC for short. The software is claimed to allow users to carefully control what recipients of email can do with the messages and certain types of attachments. It does this using encryption technology to limit the functions within Outlook, as well as the length of time a message can be viewed by the recipient. The time control element is, as far as we can determine, the package's unique function within the POP-3/SMTP environment.
This version of Mail-Lock is designed to function as an add-in for Microsoft Outlook in all its desktop Windows variants, protecting the text of the email, as well as MS-Word, Excel and Powerpoint attachments. If an attachment from another application is attached and sent, Mail-Lock cannot control what happens to the attachment at the recipient's PC: it will simply open as normal. The company is developing versions for Outlook Express and Lotus Notes users, but no timescales for the updated releases have been made.

GFI LANguard System Integrity Monitor (SIM) detects whether files have been changed on a Windows 2000/XP system. It identifies exactly which files have been changed, making it easy to restore the system to its original state, although it does not provide any utility for automatic recovery - you have to have secured original copies of these files elsewhere.

The G-Server is the only hardware in this Group Test - all the other products consist of software. It is designed to be installed inline between the DMZ port on your firewall and a public web server. It is completely transparent and requires no changes to any network settings on other network equipment. It has no IP address visible to the outside world, so is undetectable by hackers. Even the MAC addresses of its NICs reflect those of the real web server to make the G-Server even more transparent. Two G-Servers may be configured for high availability.

Entercept is an intrusion prevention system (IPS). In common with traditional host-based intrusion detection systems (HIDS), Entercept resides on the host itself, but it works at a much lower level than a normal HIDS system.

TOS stands for 'trusted operating system.' It can also be used to protect servers that are providing DNS, as well as file servers, database servers, proxy servers and mail servers. TOS can protect any static files, including whole directories, drives, Windows registries and, of course, web pages.