Sun, Symantec Team to Foil Intrusions

SAN FRANCISCO — Two Silicon Valley technology players have teamed up to help prevent security threats in a single box.

Sun Microsystems and Symantec Monday said they will launch a dedicated security appliance later this month. Based on Sun’s entry-level LX50 designs, the server runs the Solaris Platform Edition operating system for x86-based systems with Symantec’s ManHunt software preinstalled.

Dubbed the iForce Intrusion Detection Appliance, the 1U rack-mount unit and can be installed in a standard 19-inch rack. The USD$21,995 box is scheduled to initially be available and supported in North America in April 2003. The appliance will be distributed through Arrow Electronics’ MOCA division and then sold to authorized resellers.

The idea behind the iForce IDS Appliance is to profile network traffic and identify intrusions by implementing advanced protocol anomaly detection, traffic state profiling and statistical flow analysis.

The security system behind the server is Symantec’s ManHunt product. The software offers protocol anomaly detection for known and unknown or “zero day” attacks, signature detection with custom signature support, and behavioral anomaly analysis or statistical flow analysis intrusion detection for denial of service attacks (DoS) , at speeds of up to 2 gigabits per second, depending upon system configuration.

When the Cupertino, Calif.-based Norton-brand anti-virus maker originally released the product in September 2002, it was configured to support server platforms running Microsoft Windows 2000.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun says the device also reduces the risk of misconfigurations because the software is pre-installed, pre-tested and optimized with appropriate drivers and network interface cards.

“The fewer lines of code there are, the fewer ways there are to get into the box,” Sun security manager Sanjay Sharma said.

In a related announcement, Sun unveiled two new Sun Crypto Accelerator (SCA) boards — the SCA 500 and SCA 4000. Both will be available in the next three months.

The 4000 board (USD$4,200) has a session establishment rate of 4300 operations/second and is designed for FIPS 140 — 2 level 3 certification, required by many on-line financial, banking, and government applications.

The SCA 500 daughter board (USD$695) Offloads and accelerates SSL for the Sun Fire V210 and V240 servers.

Sun’s other Crypto Accelerator products include its 1000-series PCI board and its Crypto Accelerator 4000 PCI board. The company says it is still planning to release its Fire B10p and B15p SSL Proxy Blades later this year.