The VITO Report

Network Geographics is pleased to announce release 1.2 of InfoSecter, a toolset for IT and network security professionals. InfoSecter builds a functional model of traffic flow and security operations from the firewall's configuration file. With this model, InfoSecter makes it possible to find relevant firewall rules based on network packet properties or IDS / log monitor events, enabling a user to track a problem back to the root causes in the configuration file.

By using InfoSecter's functional model, IT staff can improve their firewall change review process by computing the functional differences between old and new versions of the configuration. InfoSecter also provides a constraint language for expressing security policy requirements. The user can write constraints of their policy and use InfoSecter to compute whether their firewalls are in compliance with the policy. These constraint checks can be scripted to be run periodically or on each configuration change to ensure continual security policy compliance. These operations give the security professional an extra tool to save time and effort while improving the organization's overall security stance.

Previous versions of InfoSecter could analyze firewall configurations for PIX, ASA, IOS, FWSM devices from Cisco, Netscreen devices from Juniper, and Checkpoint firewalls. With version 1.2, InfoSecter can also analyze configurations from the popular open source iptables firewall package. In 1.2 support for Cisco security devices is improved, expanding support for IOS firewalls by analyzing both context based access control (CBAC) configurations and zone based firewall (ZBF) configurations and extending support for ASA up to version 8.2.

By continuing to expand security device support, the InfoSecter approach helps a larger audience improve the accuracy of their network security policy implementation. You can experiment with the features of InfoSecter 1.2 through free web applications at http://network-geographics.com/tools. For documentation and pricing visit http://network-geographics.com/infosecter or call 888.276.2027.