Appliances bolster access control

Secure Computing (SC) unveiled a range of dedicated appliances at Infosec 2006 last week to help firms converge identity and access management.

SC’s Safeword SecureWire appliances come in three models, the 100, 500 and 2500, the numbers showing how many concurrent users each can support. The appliances can be used with SC’s Safeword tokens or RSA’s SecurID tokens for two-factor authentication. The system also supports wireless environments.

“These models are a form of unified access management appliance analogous to the unified threat management appliances being used to secure networks,” said SC’s marketing director, Stuart Rauch.

Andy Kellett of analyst Butler Group said, “I think a few security vendors are looking at this area, but it’s still at the stage of ‘no one size fits all’, since everybody’s got a range of different requirements.”

Rausch added that SecureWire is ideal for Microsoft environments since it can manage everything from Active Directory. It can also integrate with Cisco’s Network Admission Control (NAC) and Microsoft’s Network Access Protection (NAP). SC’s Safeword SecureWire appliances are available now through SC’s distributors, costing about £22,000 + VAT for the 100 up to £56,000 + VAT for the 2500 model.

Meanwhile, router and switch vendor Enterasys has launched its own network access control system, called Sentinel, and a new behavioural-based event detection system, called Dragon Network Defense, to complement its packet-based Dragon Intrusion Defense intrusion-detection and prevention system. Sentinel consists of a Trusted Access Gateway based on Dell hardware, and Trusted Access Manager software.

Enterasys’s Nick Williams said, “This is an appliance-based system sitting on the network that can assess after authentication whether laptops, IP phones or printers comply with corporate policy.”

Sentinel acts as a proxy Radius server for authentication and then uses the Nessus vulnerability scanner to scan connecting devices.

Sentinel Trusted Access Gateway and Manager are available from today, priced at £15,000 + VAT for a 500-node network and £42,000 + VAT for 2,000 nodes.