Secure Point Security Manager Suite

We have covered many types of firewalls (both appliance and

software based) in our previous issues. This time we are looking at a firewall,

which can be used to actually create an appliance-based firewall. The Secure

Point Security Manager Suite (henceforth referred to as Secure Point) is a Linux

based firewall for an enterprise. This not only protects your network from

external attacks, but also discards broadcast traffic, which is the main cause

of network congestion leading to poor performance. You can download a trial copy

of its latest version from http://securepoint.cc. This firewall is not only very

easy to configure, but also has a built in proxy server and VPN configuration

tool that allows you to protect your VPN links. Besides configuring the firewall

from an admin machine, it can also be configured from a web browser over a

secure port.

Secure Point requires a machine with at least 5 GB HDD, 128

MB RAM and two-network interfaces. Adding more RAM will give you better

performance. For management of the Suite, you require a windows machine,

installed with Secure Point Security Manager. This lets you configure and manage

the firewall remotely. The firewall is based on Linux and has a client/server

architecture that is very easy to setup. Besides the firewall, the Suite also

gives you features such as a VPN, virus scanner and content filtering. Secure

Point Security Solution runs on systems ranging from small devices up to large

multi-processor systems utilizing gigabytes of memory. You can even configure

the solution as a redundant high-availability system for automatic fail-over in

case of hardware and network failures. In order to use the organizational

bandwidth in an efficient way, the Suite has load-balancing capabilities. This

feature helps improve performance and does traffic shaping, which in turn helps

set priorities by network, service and protocol. 

The Firewall Setup Price



Secure Point comes as an ISO image, which can be burnt on a

CD. This CD is used to boot a firewall machine, and you must have at least two

network cards in the machine. The installation can be either text or graphics

based. The graphics installation is simple enough and similar to setting up any

other Linux firewall, but has a few exceptions. For one, it let's you choose a

file system to use for the firewall installation, which can be either Ext2 or

Raiserfs. If you have multiple hard drives installed on the system, it let's

you activate Software RAID (Level 1 mirroring) for better fault tolerance. From

here, it moves on to the usual process of selecting your network cards, defining

the internal and external ones, assigning them IPs, etc. Then there's a

separate step for defining the Global settings, wherein you specify name of the

machine, gateway, IP address of the administrator computer on the internal

network, etc. The rest of the process is automatic and takes about ten minutes.

Client Setup



One thing we liked about the firewall is that you have to configure a client

machine specifically to manage the firewall. For this, you need a separate

machine and install the Secure Point client on it. This client will then encrypt

all the configuration files kept on the client and ask you to define a key for

it. This ensures that nobody else can actually play around with it. From this

interface, you can configure various aspects of the firewall, such as the rules,

reports, etc.

Management



The good thing about this firewall is that it blocks all traffic by default.

This ensures that even if you deploy the firewall, it's perfectly secure. You

have to define each and every policy on the firewall, which includes defining

the various computer groups on your network, including those in the DMZ

(De-Militarized zone). We tested the firewall by flooding it with Denial of

Service (DoS) attacks. The firewall was able to detect the DoS attack and

subsequently, started dropping packets. We also ran the Nessus port scanner to

find out whether the firewall had left any ports open. As we said initially,

since all the ports were blocked by default, the attack was fruitless. The

firewall discarded all broadcast traffic that was flooding the network, which is

what a firewall should do.

Bottom line: We found this to be a pretty good

firewall building software, as it let's you control each and every aspect of

the firewall. Another thing that one should check is the support provided by the

vendor, since it has to be purchased online.

Sanjay Majumder