En Garde!

NAC Fight - Five Rounds and Counting

A blog fight! A blog fight!

No surprise Alan Shimel’s involved, and this time he’s taken on Dominic Wilde at Nevis. It started with Dominic’s post responding to Mike Fratto’s blog on the limits of NAC. I took issue with some of Mike’s blog too and left a comment.

Then Alan took Dominic to task, Dominic responded , Alan replied, Dominic replied, and Alan replied again, promising it’s his last post on the topic.

So what’s to gain from jumping into the fray, with emotions running so high and allegations flying back and forth? I think both guys have gotten a bit lost in the weeds, whining at each other about various details, but the overall nature of the debate sits close to my heart. At the highest level, Dom is arguing that pre-connect or pre-admission checks are insufficient and Alan’s arguing, well, a bunch of stuff but essentially he gets mad whenever anyone says pre-admission isn’t enough.

So let me start by saying pre-admission, of whatever quality, isn’t enough – for a lot of customers. If it were all anybody wanted, we wouldn’t have well over 100 customers. (Now I have to tease my friends at Nevis and say “come on – not a SINGLE customer announcement all year? What’s up with that?”) Of course, pre-admission is enough for some, or Still Secure wouldn’t have any customers. (And actually, Alan, I couldn’t find any customer announcements for this year on the Still Secure site either.)

Clearly I agree with Dom’s overall premise that for many enterprises, pre-admission checks aren’t enough – they need post-admission control. And by post-admission, I don’t mean just running pre-admission checks over and over again, as a lot of people want to define it. I mean something very different – truly controlling what users can do after they’re admitted onto the LAN. This level of access control involves understanding who the user is and limiting the applications and resources that user can access based on role, location, time of day, and other aspects of who the user is.

This debate between Alan and Dom went down a few other paths I’d like to touch on as well. 

Dominic – next time you steal my line, at least give me my props! Probably all nine people reading this blog fight were at the New York event and heard me draw the analogy between doing vs. teaching to talk about being inline.

Both of you – you talk about architecture, debating inline vs. out of band, as if the customers are thinking that way from the start. They're not, and they shouldn't be. They're thinking about what business problems they’re trying to solve. When they lay out their requirements, and match it up against product features, only then will architecture trends start to emerge. It so happens that if they need to actually control what people can do on the LAN, they need an inline device. The customers who need identity-based control get it – they understand that to do that, the device actually has to first see and then be intelligent about doing enforcement on all the traffic going through it. But the discussion doesn’t start with architecture religion – it starts with the enterprise’s needs.

Alan – your questions on the quality of the switch miss the point. Switching’s commoditized, for one, and second, anyone looking at a secure switch cares first and foremost about the security capabilities. Cisco, for all its switch dominance, can’t hold a candle to us on security features in its switches. Certainly we have the enterprise-class features needed to sell or we wouldn't be successfully selling it, but a purchase driven by security does change the decision focus.

For the last two quarters in a row, we’ve sold more switches than appliances, and the way this quarter’s shaping up, it looks like that'll happen again. It’s never about rip and replace – we offer both appliances and switches so enterprises can choose the platform that suits them best. But let me tell you, it’s really nice when an enterprise can take advantage of an existing, and substantial, budget item already earmarked for a switch upgrade and use that money to also get security and identity-based control built right in. It's that kind of pragmatism that shows me this stuff ends up in the infrastructure.

Both of you – way overblown on the IPS thing. Maybe Nevis uses Snort, maybe not – but regardless, it’s not the point. Enterprises will still use separate IDS/IPS devices – no one should act like even best of NAC devices will change that. But I heartily believe that if you’re sitting inline anyway, seeing all the traffic coming from the user edge of the network, and you can build in some smarts to do anomaly detection and help pinpoint network problems, you’re providing good value. And keep in mind anomalies take a lot of forms. For one of our customers, the ConSentry algorithms tripped alerts on an application built in-house. It certainly wasn’t malware, but it showed them where a piece of the code was written badly and was sending people off to the Internet for data they had in house. Not IPS, clearly, but still useful.

Alan – your rant on ASICs seems off too. Of course we at Nevis and ConSentry would be proud of our custom silicon – it’s the secret sauce for doing what we do. Even if merchant silicon is improving, we’re still way ahead of what you can buy, and owning those goods is incredibly valuable. Line rate, 10 Gbps packet inspection, including full L7 so I can show you the filename a user just accessed over Windows or the URL they just clicked on – that’s truly where we get the customer “a-ha!” moments. And you just can’t get there with off-the-shelf silicon. Secret sauce is always worth crooning about, especially when it's actually why you win.

You’re right Alan – your blog is your domain, and you are master of that domain. But I have to admit – I’m pining a bit for the old days when you blogged on stuff beyond picking on your competitors and trumpeting about Still Secure products. And riding your coattails? Come on - he's engaging in a debate that you started.

And just for the record, I’m siding with Dom here, but I can assure you I’m not playing the Olivia Newton-John role. I'm afraid neither my figure nor my voice would cut it.

Michelle McLean
mmclean-at-ConSentry-dot-com

Reflections on Gartner's Security Conference

I’m just back from attending the Gartner Security Summit in DC. I know several industry folks were there, but for those who weren’t, a few reflections on the conference.

John Pescatore kicked off the event with his “Security 3.0” talk. I didn’t react negatively to that title the way Rothman did. Pescatore was just using that scheme to call out a third era of security. He defined Security 1.0 as when everything was under lock down in the mainframe era, 2.0 was when we were perennially trying to catch security up with user activities, and 3.0 is about trying to get ahead of the game.

What I object to with that title is posing this concept as something new - I think most people thinking about security have been trying to "get ahead" vs. "just react" for a while now. That aside, though, I do believe that thinking about what you can do to get security built in vs. layered on later is a really helpful exercise. One, you get more security, period – you get it built into the network, the application, the PC, etc.

And two - and here's the really interesting angle - the more you get security “built in” to stuff, the more you can shift capital costs to hit budgets other than the security budget. I love this idea, in large part because we’re seeing it today here at ConSentry with our secure switch. We have customers who have a switch upgrade already on the books. They use that money to upgrade to secure switches instead of plain ol’ vanilla switches and presto – even with no separate NAC or other security line item, they get a massive new security layer built into the edge of the LAN. Another argument for why it’s got to be built right into the infrastructure.

In another session, Gartner analyst Rich Mogull hosted a panel on vulnerability research and ethical disclosure, with Thomas Ptacek, Chris Wysopal, and David Maynor. All three guys had interesting perspectives and experiences to share. I’m not sure the average conference attendee got too much out of it – what these researchers do is usually a bit removed from the average enterprise, even if it shouldn’t be. But having read those guys’ blogs for a while, it made for fun listening. And it was good to meet Ptacek in person – maybe he’ll find another way to call ConSentry “committed” to security now that we’ve met face to face!

The highlight, though, was the Lawrence Orans session on NAC. Parts of it demonstrated the “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” phenomenon – lots of pre-admission focus, which is no surprise given Cisco’s dominance in general and especially within the Gartner client set. But in the entire hour’s talk, he shared just one customer case study – and it was a ConSentry customer! Very, very cool to see our application, and the customer’s need for role-based control, as his one example of an interesting deployment.

All in all, a good two days, especially meeting other bloggers, talking with several of the analysts one-on-one, seeing other industry folks like Richard Stiennon, and best of all chatting with enterprise users in between sessions.

--Michelle McLean
mmclean-at-consentry-dot-com 

It's All About Controlling Users

Fortunately or unfortunately, I have another job at ConSentry aside from blogging, so I don't get to do it as frequently as I'd like. But the discussion that started, for the umpteenth time, a few days back on where the value is in NAC is just too important to leave with mis-information. So I'm responding to Alan's (is that better, Alan? ;)) comments here in more detail.

Let's be clear about one thing first - yes, ConSentry is really strong in post-admission. No, that's not why I think post-admission is the key to doing access control right. Let's think about typical business problems today:

The offshore development office where you've got no oversight over your "employees"
The contractors who have to be on your LAN but should only go to certain servers
The medical devices, robots, printers, and VoIP phones that need protection but can't host an agent
The stored data with no app-level control, like the research docs the DuPont guy stole
The credit card data that you have to not only restrict access to but document that control

None of these is solved with pre-admission control - not one. It's all about limiting what people can do AFTER they're on the LAN.

Admission control has limited value. And in case I haven't been clear in my opinion here, let me just say that I think admission control has limited value. It's not worthless - it just doesn't buy you much. And I believe that for reasons well beyond the fact that I work at ConSentry.

To be clear, ConSentry "gets it" that you need pre-admission control as a piece of the overall security solution. We just don't think that delivering our own installed endpoint agent is what customers want. Let's look at the strategy:

For unmanaged machines, no installed agent - you don't own the device, you're not installing software on it. Enter the ConSentry dissolvable agent. And yes, Alan, we OEM it from Check Point. Looks at OS, looks at AV, checks for adware/malware/spyware, looks at Registry settings, etc. Way more than "do you have AV software installed?" which is where a lot of dissolvable agents stop.

For managed machines, you need a permanent agent. We're smoking something if we believe you'll buy one from ConSentry. If Cisco's not winning at that game, why the heck would we think we could? Enterprises don't want to install yet another agent just to do NAC. They'll wait for MS NAP or they'll get the latest Sygate/McAfee/Trend version - something that's ALREADY on their desktop will do it. The managed PC is the desktop team's problem, and they're going to use software that's already on the desktop for NAC. That's where I think Amrit and Stiennon are really coming from - why would you go through all that trouble and expense of installing new software on the PC just for NAC? The endpoint software guys know they need to get there - hence the Symantec acquisitions of Sygate and Altiris.

So ConSentry's strategy - go figure - is why fight the customer. We'll work with NAP and Sygate and McAfee and Trend and any of the endpoint guys our customers ask us to. We're already working with regional endpoint guys in Europe and Japan, too - we call this Universal Endpoint Interoperability. We excel at post-admission control, but we know you need endpoint checking too, so we'll leverage whatever you've already got on the desktop to do it. And we'll give you a dissolvable agent to check the desktops you don't own.

As for advocating for out of band vs. inline, it's like the old saying - if you can do, do. If you can't, teach. Now that's actually heretical in my book since both my parents were teachers, but seriously, if you have the horsepower to be inline, and you're focused on security, you sit inline - full stop. It's always more secure to be inline. Those who advocate out of band simply CAN'T sit inline.

Alan's right - it's all about identity-based control. But out-of-band approaches cannot provide identity-based control. Taking feeds from an IDS does not equate to identity-based control. VLANs and ACLs do not equate to identity-based control. What do you do for the simple case, say the CIO? She's an exec and she's in IT - she needs overlapping sets of permissions. Are you going to build a VLAN of one for her, and then for every other person with a unique set of access rights? It just doesn't work. Plus, all this VLAN and ACL stuff is happening at L3 and L4, and what you really need is L7 - really understanding the app involved and applying access rights with that parameter as well.

Identity-based control is knowing all sorts of info about the user - name, addresses, location, role, group memberships - and mapping that to all sorts of info about what's happening at that moment - what server are you going to, what app are you running, what time of day is it - and applying policy to control access based on that entire universe of info.

I was an analyst and journalist for nine years, and as Rothman says, the instinct for skepticism simply doesn't get out of your blood. I didn't check my brain at the door in favor of a fresh batch of Kool-Aid when I joined ConSentry. I believe what I believe about the need for post-admission control not because it's all I have to hawk but because customers constantly affirm they need it. I'm fortunate to get a fair bit of time with customers, and many of them were trying to do this stuff with ACLs and VLANs, and it just wasn't working.

I'll readily admit to the "selective reality" problem, where given what your product's good at, you end up in front of customers with problems you can solve instead of those who can't use your technology. But that said, all you need to do is read the news today about what's getting companies into trouble and it's crystal clear it's all about controlling users after they're on the LAN. I believe that through and through, regardless of what ConSentry makes.

--Michelle McLean

mmclean-at-consentry-dot-com

Security as an After-Thought and (again!) What NAC Can Do for You

Art Wittman's recent column in Network Computing on how "Security Drives Everything" highlights some of the findings in the latest NAC survey from the Network Computing/Current Analysis collaboration. Art comments that the healthcare industry, at least as embodied by Kaiser Permanente, has not embraced NAC because NAC can't help secure its medical devices.

Then Amrit, Shimel, and Stiennon are once again getting all worked up about the value of NAC. Amrit and Stiennon are boxing it into a corner saying it buys you minimal security and Shimel, understandably, is arguing the other side.

I have to say, I end up agreeing more with Amrit and Stiennon on this one - the way most NAC is positioned, especially Cisco's NAC and CCA/NAC Appliance, there isn't much value. Checking the integrity of a machine before admitting it, and verifying the user as authenticated, just doesn't buy you much. Is it a good best practice, and should it help define the access policy for your users? Yes. Does it set the bar for security? Far from it. That's why the Kaiser guy says NAC isn't for him - in that form, it can't support one of his most critical issues, which is to protect the medical devices on his LAN.

To meet Stiennon's Venn diagram take on what security should encompass, it must provide far more than pre-admission control. The big risk to organizations is what users can do after they're on the LAN, so network ACCESS control, in the broadest sense of what you should be allowed to access on the LAN, is key for businesses to protect their data.

It's also how the Kaiser guy can get his medical devices protected. Agent-based NAC won't help him at all. Instead, he needs a way to place that device into a "medical device" role and control what devices it can receive from and send to and what protocols it can run. That's how he can protect a CT scan machine from getting hit by a virus or other attack and protect against the machine or its port from being co-opted and used for evil.

IT needs to be thinking about network access control in its broadest form, and that really means having full control over all your users and devices, the whole time they're on the LAN.

Related to this broader definition, Rothman comments on Art's column and makes the point that too many IT folks see security as an after thought rather than fundamental to their business. He argues that to do things right, IT has to "talk business to the business people." Part of the challenge there is that the security products have to let IT implement controls using business logic. When all you have are VLANs and ACLs, it makes it pretty tough for IT to talk business.

Instead, they need tools that let them map those business policies much more intelligently into network enforcement practices. They also need infrastructure that embeds the security directly, rather than forcing IT to bolt on new features or use old dogs like VLANs and ACLs to perform new tricks like identity-based control. We talk about embedded security as Secure Switching - the ability to control every user and secure every port on the LAN. Whether it's an appliance, which is pragmatic for organizations not doing a switch refresh, or whether it's a secure switch if a company is upgrading their switches, the key is to have control capabilities embedded directly in the infrastructure.

That way, you're getting far more than NAC - which at the end of the day should simply be a feature on a switch. And you're not stuck with security as an after-thought - it's enabled in the infrastructure, supported by the tools to apply business logic so IT can finally talk business to the business people.

--Michelle McLean
mmclean-at-consentry-dot-com

In Good Company

Last week, Cisco had an announcement about an updated Supervisor 32 engine for its 6500 line of Catalyst switches. Understandably, this news fell under the radar of most security blogs and reports, but it's worth highlighting. The heart of this new Sup engine is the Programmable Intelligence Services Accelerator, promising L7 packet inspection and enforcement, and the focus is on getting this kind of intelligence in the wiring closet, as a blade in 6500s deployed at the LAN edge.

It's exciting to see Cisco drive this message around the need for security in the wiring closet, and for ConSentry, the timing couldn't be better. We rolled out our Secure Switching news today, and it's great to be in such good company as we drive that message. Of course, the Cisco module isn't out quite yet, and it'll max out at 2 Gbps, but we definitely get a boost from the Cisco messaging that this is the way IT should be building LANs. And it clearly broadens the message well beyond the well-worn Network Access Control path.

We also decided to have a little fun with our news and how we explain the impact on the wiring closet. If you get a second, check out our take on what this all means for enterprise networks.

--Michelle McLean
mmclean-at-consentry-dot-com