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SecureTrack™ Security Operations Management, Auditing & Compliance for Cisco Firewalls, Routers and Switches

February, 2012

www.tufin.com

http://www.tufin.com/

Firewall Operations for Cisco 2/11

Table of Contents

Introduction ............................................................................................................. 3

Comprehensive View of Firewall Policy ................................................................ 4

Configuration Change Management ...................................................................... 5

Security Policy Optimization and Cleanup ............................................................ 5

Risk Management .................................................................................................... 6

Network Topology Intelligence............................................................................... 7

Rule Documentation and Recertification ............................................................... 7

Corporate Auditing and Compliance ..................................................................... 8

Automatic Security Policy Generation ................................................................... 8

Compliance with Best Practices ............................................................................ 9

Scalable, Distributed Deployment Architecture and Multi-Tenancy ................. 10

Firewall Operations, Auditing and Compliance: The Automated Solution ........ 10


Introduction

Managing network security for an organization or a service provider has become a highly complex operation involving dozens or even hundreds of firewalls and routers. Multiple sites and teams, different hardware and software vendors – all of these factors make it virtually impossible to maintain an accurate, airtight security policy on every device. At the same time, internal security policies have become more rigorous, and organizations need to comply with a growing body of industry and government regulations.

To make sure that security standards are being met, most organizations rely on periodic audits – a process involving days of manual, painstaking effort. In addition to the tremendous investment of time and resources, relying on audits is a reactive approach to network security that can leave threats undetected for months at a time.

Today’s security operations teams urgently need a management solution that can proactively assure network security and achieve Continuous Compliance with standards while automating labor-intensive day-to-day tasks. In practical terms, firewall operations teams need:

Central management starting with a top-down view of all Cisco firewalls, routers and switches in the organization, the Cisco Security Manager (CSM), and firewalls from other vendors

Management of both next-generation and network-layer firewalls

Change management to ensure that every configuration change made to a firewall, router or switch is accountable and in accordance with corporate standards

Proactive risk analysis and business continuity management to evaluate the impact of every configuration change and ensure Continuous Compliance with standards

ACL optimization and cleanup to eliminate security loopholes, improve firewall performance, and reduce hardware costs

Network topology intelligence to visually analyze the access path between any source and destination

Rule (ACE) documentation that enables you to manage ACE ownership, expiration and recertification.

Automated security audits to efficiently comply with corporate policies as well as industry and government regulations

Automatic ACL generation to enable rapid deployment of new firewalls without disrupting business continuity or resorting to permissive rules

Alignment with best practices from vendors and security industry veterans

Scalable support for large enterprises and datacenters including distributed deployment, multiple device domains and role-based management.

Tufin SecureTrack™ enables security operations teams to dramatically reduce risk while increasing compliance and efficiency. With a powerful set of real-time and analytical tools, SecureTrack tackles the practical challenges that operations teams face every day when it comes to managing Cisco firewalls, routers and switches. This paper takes a closer look at each of the key requirements in security operations management and explains how SecureTrack enables companies to eliminate potential threats, lower costs, and achieve their strategic security objectives.


Comprehensive View of Firewall Policy

Enterprises and service providers currently manage dozens, if not hundreds, of individual network security devices including network-layer firewalls, next-generation firewalls, Web proxies, load balancers, routers and switches. Each device has its own policy or access control list (ACL) - a complex set of rules defining the access privileges and restrictions for specific users and services. Today, administrators lack a unified top-down view of all of their security policies on all of their Cisco devices as well as other vendors, and need to individually monitor each piece of the puzzle.

Tufin SecureTrack provides a convenient, top-down view of all ACLs and security policies in the organization that is fully interoperable with the Cisco Security Manager. You can view the current configuration as well as historical views and snapshots. Each policy is displayed using Cisco’s native layout and conventions. SecureTrack makes it simple to visually compare and review devices. For example, you can analyze a side-by-side view of the same firewall at two different points in time, and you can compare the settings of different firewalls in a variety of views and reports.

SecureTrack’s dashboard and interactive browsers enable you to immediately assess your overall security posture and to drill down for more information in order to analyze and remediate threats.

On or off site, SecureTrack enables you to centrally manage alerts and notifications and generate reports for your entire security infrastructure. Since it is easy to learn and use, within minutes you can integrate SecureTrack into your network environment and start real-time monitoring.

In addition to the list of vendors currently supported by SecureTrack, the Tufin Open Platform (TOP) enables enterprises and integrators to easily extend the platform and support additional vendors and infrastructure components through simple plugins.


Configuration Change Management

Organizations are constantly in motion. So implementing a corporate security policy is not a one-shot deal. Every day, configuration changes are made in response to user requests for network access, security threats and changes to the network structure. Monitoring, tracking and analyzing these configuration changes is probably the biggest challenge facing firewall administrators today. And the problem is not limited to ACLs. Changes to the configuration and performance of the firewall operating system or firmware also directly impact security and business continuity, yet they are difficult to track with conventional methods.

Tufin SecureTrack continuously monitors and keeps track of every security configuration change including changes to ACEs and network objects such as hosts and services. Comprehensive change reports include Cisco firewalls, routers and switches as well as other vendors, using the native conventions – for example, field names and colors. SecureTrack offers a variety of customizable change reports as well as comparisons of different firewalls, or different historical snapshots. Reports can be sliced by firewall, by rule, by object, or by the type of change.

Full accountability is assured since each change is stored along with the administrator’s name, the time, and the server where the change originated. SecureTrack makes it possible to determine who made a change with a simple query, rather than searching through numerous log files for the needle in the haystack.

SecureTrack also integrates with leading ticketing systems so that changes can be tracked from the original request through approvals to implementation. Each change in a SecureTrack report includes a link to the relevant ticket so that you can automatically launch the ticket for more information.

Using real-time alerts, SecureTrack sends an e-mail to designated administrators in response to every change that may conflict with corporate security policy. Rather than wait for the next audit, SecureTrack empowers you to proactively prevent security risks before they actually arise. Alerts are also useful for ongoing management – even when you are off site, SecureTrack alerts can inform you of any or all changes via e-mail.

Security Policy Optimization and Cleanup

As thousands of tickets are processed by the security team, and organizational security objectives evolve over time, the underlying ACLs become very large, intricate and complex. In fact, many of the rules (ACEs) and objects in a typical firewall rule base are obsolete. These unused ACEs represent a potential security hole and should be eliminated. Yet administrators do not have an easy way of identifying them with standard administration tools.

In addition to security risks, a poorly maintained ACL can have a major impact on performance. The entire ACL is parsed from top to bottom with every network connection, and as it grows, hardware requirements also increase.

SecureTrack analyzes the actual usage of individual ACEs and labels each one as heavily used, moderately used, or unused. SecureTrack also analyzes object usage within each ACE, indicating specific network objects and services that are no longer in use. It is advisable to review every unused ACE and object, and remove those that are not necessary and may represent a security risk.

To improve device performance, SecureTrack makes recommendations regarding the position of specific ACEs – placing the heavily used ACEs at the top of the list and moving the least-used ACEs to the bottom. SecureTrack also indicates rule shadowing – places where ACEs overlap, or effectively “hide” others– so that you can re-position them intelligently.


You can view the latest optimization recommendations in the SecureTrack dashboard and Clean-Up browser or generate a customized report at any time.

Risk Management

The implications of a security configuration error can be severe – from a breach to network downtime, or even a network service interruption. Therefore, it is essential to analyze the impact of every change before it is implemented in the production environment. The same is true for the router configuration, where routine system maintenance can expose vulnerabilities or even disrupt business.

In addition, security managers must be able to assess risk and vulnerability at any given time – for all relevant network security devices. The challenge is greatest in distributed organizations with multiple teams. Inevitably, different teams develop their own standards and working methodologies. To ensure that everybody is successfully implementing security guidelines, organizations need to implement automated solutions that can evaluate risk and compliance at all times.

To manage risk and ensure business continuity, SecureTrack uses a multi-step approach:

Security administrators define the organization’s security compliance policy for mission critical and risky services within SecureTrack. SecureTrack automatically compares every change that is made to the firewall, router or switch configuration and sends out a real-time alert in the case of a violation to the organization’s compliance policy. This capability is firewall vendor agnostic and implemented transparently in heterogeneous environments.

The SecureTrack dashboard and the interactive Risk browser always show the current level of risk along with a prioritized list of risk factors, so that you can investigate and remediate as soon as possible.

Before implementing a change, administrators can use SecureTrack’s Security Policy Analysis to simulate the change on the ACL and identify possible conflicts or violations. This proactive risk analysis tool can save hours of painstaking, manual ACL review.

The Security Risk Report summarizes the current risk posture and calculates your Security Score. The report can be run at the organizational level or per gateway, and indicates risk trends in addition to the current state. To determine the Security Score,


the report uses your compliance policies as well as a group of pre-defined risk factors culled from leading industry standards. You can set your own priorities and customize the report to exclude specific policies, risk factors or even ACEs that cause false positive violations.

Network Topology Intelligence

Given the size and complexity of today’s networks, it is not easy to maintain a clear picture of all of its devices and zones. When faced with a network access request from a user, or a change request from IT, it can take time to understand which firewalls and network components are involved.

SecureTrack discovers an organizations’ network topology and provides security administrators with a dynamic, visual map. The map, which is continuously updated in response to network changes, identifies firewalls, routers and network zones such as the DMZ. SecureTrack supports very large maps and enables you to add unmonitored routers in order to create the most complete picture.

Network Topology Intelligence is an integral part of many SecureTrack and SecureChange features including policy analysis, compliance and security risk reports, and the Policy Designer. It automatically identifies the devices and zones that are relevant for an access request making it easier for you to analyze, modify and report on security policies.

Rule Documentation and Recertification

A key best practice for security policies is to periodically review each ACE (rule) and remove the ones that are no longer required. Since ACLs regularly contain hundreds of ACEs, and there are often multiple administrators making changes, it is optimal to document each ACE as it is created, and to assign an expiration date.

Among firewall, router and switch vendors, the ability to document rules and set expiration dates is handled to varying extents – or not at all – so it is important to be able to manage ACE and rule ownership, expiration and recertification centrally.

With SecureTrack, you can continuously weed out ACEs that are no longer needed and prevent ACLs from growing out of control. You can document each ACE, identify the technical and business owners, and indicate an expiration date upon which the ACE must be reviewed. At any time, you can sort and filter ACEs according to expiration date and/or owner and recertify, or remove them, as needed. You can also define scheduled reports and alerts to proactively stay on top of ACE status at all times.

Rule documentation is a valuable tool for justification of rules as required by certain audits such as PCI DSS.


Auditing and Continuous Compliance

Organizations now understand the business impact of network security and are demanding a high level of transparency and accountability from network operations teams. In addition, more and more companies need to conform to government and industry standards such as PCI DSS and SOX.

To meet these increasingly rigorous standards, you need the ability to efficiently perform periodic audits. Owing to the size and dynamic nature of ACLs, it is extremely time-consuming to do this manually, even for an expert. You need an automated audit process that can be configured to meet the specific requirements of both corporate and regulatory standards.

To hold individuals accountable for their actions, organizations need to maintain an accurate audit trail of all ACL and operating system changes. It is preferable that the audit trail come from an objective third party or automatic logging tool. Furthermore, you need to enforce and demonstrate a separation of duties designed to ensure that all changes are approved and monitored properly.

SecureTrack provides automatic audit reports that test current device configuration against your corporate security policy as well as a configurable checklist of standards. Along with a list of violations, Tufin’s audit reports provide information on how to resolve or mitigate the infraction. Specialized reports, such as the PCI DSS Audit and the Cisco DCR are already designed according to the requirements of the industry standard. Audit reports can be scheduled for automatic, periodic execution and mailed to all relevant security officers.

SecureTrack supports periodic audits with continuous change tracking and a comprehensive audit trail that provides full accountability and demonstrates implementation of a separation of duties. Change reports can be generated at any time to show the configuration changes that were made both to the ACL and to the operating system.

But auditing is not enough. The true goal of security regulations is Continuous Compliance. So in between audits, it is essential to continuously monitor every single change, to assess risks and to mitigate threats before they materialize.

Since SecureTrack issues real-time alerts any time a configuration change violates corporate policy, all security threats can be addressed immediately. This transforms the periodic audit into the reporting process it is meant to be, and enables you to deliver Continuous Compliance to your organization..

Cisco Device Configuration Report (DCR)

SecureTrack’s Device Configuration Report is specially designed for Cisco routers, checking for common security settings and misconfigurations that are critical for overall device and network security. The report, which is in line with the CIS and the NSA’s Router Security Configuration Guide, checks for many common security settings like SNMP settings, authentication settings, NTP settings, unnecessary services, SYSLOG settings, and more.


Automatic Security Policy (ACL) Generation

Network security teams are frequently asked to secure unrestricted network segments – for example, between branch offices or merged companies – or to tighten up permissive ACLs. This is very difficult to achieve without accidentally disrupting critical business services. Through labor-intensive manual log inspection, administrators try to identify legitimate business traffic and create a rule set that will meet both security and business objectives. But given the complexity of network traffic today, this process is not only tedious and error-prone – it is also not very effective. As a result, companies often deploy firewalls with permissive ANY rules that do little to fulfill their security objectives. Network security teams need an automatic solution for defining new ACLs and tightening up permissive ones that can reduce deployment times and ensure business continuity.

With SecureTrack’s Automatic Policy Generator™ (APG), you can automatically generate a new, robust firewall policy (ACL) based on a thorough analysis of current network traffic. APG creates an ACL that is not too permissive, is optimized for high performance and organized for easy management and maintenance. Fast and efficient, APG processes thousands of logs to create a new ACL within minutes.

APG also provides security professionals with a powerful tool for tightening existing firewalls, re-building complex, heavy ACLs, and analyzing ACLs of firewalls inherited from other organizations. APG evaluates the permissiveness of each ACE and provides concrete recommendations on how to improve them. Using an interactive graph, you can set the balance between the degree of permissiveness and the number of ACEs that is generated. APG is powered by Tufin’s patent-pending Permissive Rule Analysis technology. For more information read the APG Whitepaper.

Compliance with Best Practices

Over the years, security best practices have evolved that enable organizations to manage their security infrastructure more effectively. Given the variety of devices – different vendors, versions and administration tools – it is difficult to enforce industry best practices throughout the organization. Managers need tools that define best practices and are able to identify non-conformance for the full range of security devices.

In SecureTrack, Tufin has gathered a long list of best practices derived from firewall vendors, industry experts and years of practical experience. The configurable Best Practices Audit report instantly checks compliance with practices such as log tracking (rules that are

http://www.tufin.com/apg_wp.php


untracked or unlogged), permissive rules (that allow traffic from too many IP addresses), network object name patterns, firewall OS settings, and more.

Scalable, Distributed Deployment Architecture and Multi-Tenancy

At large organizations, firewalls and related security infrastructure are frequently distributed at multiple sites, even in different countries. Slow network connections can frustrate attempts to analyze data from a central location and maintain consistency throughout the organization. Similarly, at large datacenters, network devices are often distributed on multiple management servers to increase performance. Yet it is still important to manage the security posture centrally.

Tufin SecureTrack features a robust distributed architecture that uses T-Series appliances to collect data from each site. Suitable for wide area networks, the collectors forward data to a central database for administration. SecureTrack is designed to overcome connection downtime between components and ensure a continuous, centralized management environment.

If you need to maintain integrity between sites or business units, SecureTrack provides full segregation of data along with flexible, role-based administrator definitions that provide access control for each management domain. At the same time, it gives you the ability to leverage Policy Analysis Queries and reports that you have designed for multiple tenants.

For all mission critical data centers, Tufin offers high availability, database compression, high-performance appliances and disaster recovery.

Firewall Operations, Auditing and Compliance: The Automated Solution

As network security infrastructure grows more distributed and diverse, operations teams must have central management solutions to ensure network security and Continuous Compliance, while keeping costs under control. Tufin SecureTrack enables you to monitor, track and report changes for all Cisco firewalls, routers and switches in the organization. It creates a complete audit trail with full personal accountability for every change, along with configurable audit reports that support a wide variety of standards and regulations. With in-depth analysis tools, it gives you the power to proactively assess risks, replace permissive rules, and optimize the performance of your firewalls. SecureTrack is an essential solution for any organization that cannot afford to compromise on security and efficiency.

Tufin is a member of the Cisco Developer Network and Tufin Security Suite has successfully completed interoperability testing with Cisco Security Manager 4.3.

According to an analysis performed by Frost & Sullivan, organizations can slash the time required to make configuration changes, and to perform security audits, by as much as 75% (see Security Lifecycle Management ROI). Tufin customers report that on average, SecureTrack cuts the cost of daily operations tasks in up to a half, so that they can focus on the strategic part of their jobs instead of on routine, manual work.

SecureTrack features all of the tools that operations teams need to ensure network security every day:

Change tracking and analysis: Monitors firewall changes, reports them in real-time and

maintains a comprehensive, accurate audit trail for full accountability.

Security infrastructure optimization: Analysis and clean-up of complex ACLs and

objects to eliminate potential security breaches and improve performance.


Risk management: Assessment of Security Score and risk trends based on

conformance to compliance policies and industry-standard risk factors.

Network topology intelligence: Discovery of network topology from monitored devices

and creation of a dynamic map including firewalls, routers and network zones. Automatic

identification of relevant devices and zones in requests, queries and reports.

Rule documentation and recertification: Documentation of ACEs and automatic

identification of expired ACEs so that they can be removed and recertified as needed.

Auditing and regulatory compliance: Automated audit reports to demonstrate

compliance with corporate policy and regulatory standards including PCI-DSS, SOX,

NERC, HIPAA, ISO 17799 and Basel II.

Cisco DCR: Checks for common security settings and misconfigurations on Cisco

routers.

Multi-vendor visual monitoring: Intuitive, graphical views of ACLs and other security

policies, for the largest variety of vendors and network devices.

Comprehensive security policy analysis: In-depth analysis of organizational security

policy implementation on a wide range of security devices.

Automatic firewall policy generation: Definition of a new firewall ACL based on an

analysis of network traffic and elimination of permissive rules.

Multi-vendor best practice audit: Ability to compare current configuration with best

practice recommendations derived from extensive industry experience.

Scalable and business-critical: Includes high availability, database compression,

robust appliances and disaster recovery.

Distributed, multi-tenant architecture: Distributed architecture supports unlimited

firewalls, rules and network objects in large or distributed datacenters. Support for

multiple tenants or domains provides security among customers or business units.

Learn more about SecureTrack at www.tufin.com.

© 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 Tufin Software Technologies, Ltd. Tufin, SecureChange, SecureTrack, Automatic Policy Generator, and the Tufin logo are trademarks of Tufin Software Technologies Ltd. All other product names

mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

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