Sun, Partners Develop Security Appliances

On the first day of the NetWorld+Interop 2003 Conference in Las Vegas yesterday, Sun, along with three of its partners under the iForce initiative, announced a line of security appliances to aid the IT community in its ongoing efforts to stop virus attacks, prevent spam from taxing their mail servers and perhaps most importantly, stopping hackers from gaining a foothold on corporate networks.

The iForce line of security devices will become available in North America in the summer of 2003. These include a mail firewall appliance and intrusion management appliances. Sun is positioning the hardware line as a cost-effective, easy-to-deploy way for enterprise customers to guard against some of today's biggest security concerns.

Sun and Borderware's iForce Mail Firewall Appliance integrates virus detection with anti-spam technologies (Local Learning Token Analysis, Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse) to keep infected emails and spam from infiltrating the network. The device sits between a firewall and a company's mail servers, protecting against directory harvesting and providing server-to-server TLS (Transport Layer Security) encryption. It also supports secure webmail access from remote PCs.

For its iForce Intrusion Management Appliance, Sun teamed with DeepNines to mitigate attacks on corporate networks. At the heart of the device is DeepNine's Sleuth9 technology and is designed to reside between a company's edge router and the Internet.

By protecting networks from both inbound and outbound threats, the hardware helps to keep unassuming server rooms from becoming Internet-crippling DoS and DDoS points of origin. Additionally, administrators can use the its packet monitoring and IP spoofing detection capabilities to keep unwanted individuals out.

Lastly, Sun announced a separate set of Intrusion Management Appliances, but this time from a partnership with a company whose technology has strong open source roots. Known for advocating an open source security model and developing hardware powered by Snort, Sourcefire will provide its experience in open source network intrusion detection to secure networks via Sun hardware. The company's current intrusion management system is available on Sun's LX50, a general-purpose, dual processor server in Linux or Solaris flavors.

iForce is a program sponsored by Sun in which third-party software and hardware makers collaborate with the company and its partners. Once an iForce partner, Sun lends its aid in product development, marketing, and sales.