Security Appliance Solutions from SECURE COMPUTING®

Protecting your Network with the Sidewinder Security Appliance

The concept of the security appliance has revolutionized the industry, bringing greater utility and ease of use to security managers everywhere. Individual security point solutions, deployed alongside productivity applications on standard servers with commercial operations, are inherently limited, and while those solutions may bring some reassurance, the security applications themselves are insecure because of the platform on which they run.

A security appliance overcomes this inherent vulnerability. For a security tool to be effective, the tool must start by making sure that the security software itself is invulnerable to attack. The only way to do this is to run the security software on a stand-alone hardware platform, that is isolated from the other productivity applications, and to run that platform on a hardened operating system. Commercial operating systems are not designed with security as their foremost concern, and are vulnerable to many attacks. Of course, these commercial OSes do have security built in, but they are built with the primary goal of convenience. Because the security appliance does not have to run standard productivity applications, it does not have the same OS requirements as other systems. Secure Computing's Sidewinder® security appliance runs on SecureOS®, a hardened operating system that gives it a resilient foundation that has been proven effective over the years.

The firewall, or security appliance, is the first system an attacker encounters when trying to penetrate a network, and so the security appliance has the dual role of protecting the network, and protecting the appliance itself. SecureOS, and its Type Enforcement® technology, protects everything in the security appliance, including every file, directory, and application, against root access. Every piece of software that comes pre-installed on the Sidewinder security appliance is absolutely protected, and it is simply impossible to install malicious software, install a buffer overflow attack, or launch any type of other known or unknown attack. The Sidewinder security appliance is built on patented Type Enforcement technology, which imposes mandatory access control (MAC). This hard codes the Sidewinder security appliance's software, so no user, under any circumstances, can reduce the level of access restriction that is imposed by the software itself. It also makes it impossible for any malware to be installed on the appliance.

This approach eliminates all unconstrained privileges and extraneous services that would be found on a commercial OS, and provides for a strong level of separation of the operating system and other applications, as well as between the applications themselves. To learn more about the Sidewinder security appliance, SecureOS and Type Enforcement, please visit our Sidewinder security appliance page.