SonicWall SSL-VPN 4000

A secure remote access solution for enterprises with 500 or more users, which allows browser based access to files, Web apps, Outlook Web Access, and much more

Thursday, August 09, 2007

SSL-VPN 4000 provides secure remote access to various sources on an organization's network from anywhere in the world. It has a console port that connects to an external network such as the Internet. All remote access occurs through this port. Interestingly, there are five other Ethernet ports on the box, which according to SonicWall, are all reserved for future use.

There are various ways to deploy this VPN appliance. You can connect the box to your organization's Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). You can connect it on a different subnet on your own network. The latter option would be feasible for a large enterprise that needs to provide secure access to branch offices connected on its WAN.

There is no restriction on how many concurrent users can connect to the device, but for optimal performance, SonicWall recommends 200 concurrent users. To test the device, we connected it to a router. A machine was kept on the LAN with file sharing enabled on it. The appliance itself supports web-based management, which is fairly easy to use. We created a user on it, and then tried to access the internal share from a machine connected to the router's WAN interface. An IP range was also defined that would be assigned to external users who connect to the internal resource. After this, all external users wanting to connect to the internal network would first have to login to the VPN appliance. They have to download a small client from the appliance, which would then facilitate the login. Once this is done, future logins become easy. Once the appliance logged our external user in, we were able to easily access the internal share. We were easily able to upload and download files to this internal file share, all through the VPN appliance, over a secure link. Likewise, the appliance allows external users to access other internal resources. These could be a Web application, Outlook Web Access, a Citrix Presentation Server, and many other sources.You could for instance, remotely control desktops or even servers. This can be very useful for IT managers, as they can manage their IT infrastructure remotely.

Speaking of secure, we did run our army of security benchmarks on the appliance. It managed to withstand all of them. Our slew of tests included Nessus, Nmap, and even a tool for attacking SSL devices, called OpenSSL-to-open. Nessus showed zero risks and warnings, and Open SSL-to-open also failed to penetrate. Nmap also reported similar results.

Bottomline: With its security and good performance, this device is a good buy for enterprises that need remote access into their networks.

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