Cisco PIX 506E

Cisco Pix 506E Security Appliance

This firewall is a enterprise class security appliance. It could be used for small to medium sized businesses, sattelite offices and regional offices.It supports two 10/100 fast ethernet cards and also two 802.1q virtual interfaces.This alows your business to create a DMZ or demilitarized zone. This is a spot on your network that you put your webservers but not your backend servers like SQL or Exchange. Cisco took the approach of multilayered defense again with this product and it has alot of nice feautres to help protect your network and data.There are no moving parts making it more reliable.

The Cisco Pix 506E uses what Cisco calls Cisco Adaptive Security Algorithim.This provides statefull packet inspection it logs all authorized attempts to use the network as well as trying to block unauthorized access.The firewall is designed to look for common vulnerabilities, it looks for about 55 well known attacks.It inspects layers 4 through 7 os the OSI layers. The Cisco Pix 506E also looks at application data traversing the network and even protocol status.The designers of this firewall did a good job. The Cisco Adaptive Security Algorithim does protocol field checking and also URL length checking. It does not mention anything about if it can filter Unicode.It has over 100 applications already documented so you can allow or disallow them easily.

Cisco PIX Device manager allows administrators to manage their network remotely.Network or Firewall administratos can still create their own ACL's or access control lists and user and group based policies. Network administrators can decide which applications that are and are not allowed thru their network as well as protocols.Protocols that this device checks are HTTP, FTP,SMTP, DNS, SQl*Net,NFS,ILS, SCCP and many more.For instance I would not allow my employess to use Telnet, if they needed remote connectivity at all I would suggest SSH using a cool program called Putty for Windows based machines.

Since Im on the topic of remote management I will talk about some of the Cisco Pix 506E solutions.The are many different ways to mange this device. It can be troubleshooted and configured remotely.If you have a web browser which I hope all admins have, you can access this firewall through the Internet. It uses SNMP simple network management protocol for monitoring devices on the network.You can use Auto Update server, security monitor and management center for firewalls.

The firewall does auditing, has support for Dynamic devices on the network and can do software images.

The Cisco Pix 506E also has support for VPN's or virtual private networks.You can use either IKE Internet Key Exchange or IPsec.Cisco also offers VPN concentrators to speed up connections. I will be writing articles on those shorlty. The encryption standards it supports are DES data encryption standard, this is crackable. 3DES which is more secure and AES advanced encryption standard. I recommend the later. The VPN can work with NAT or network address translation which hides your internal IP address from the Internet. Support for up to 10 VPN uers.The firewall also supports TACAS+ and RADIUS.

VoIP- Voice over Internet protocol can also be ran thru this firewall. So that you can sleep well at night knowing that your multimedia and voice connections are secure.
This is probably my favorite about this device. Intrusion Prevention. This firewall has tools that protect it from many well-known attacks.

Dos or denial of service attacks are prevented from bringing down your network and firewall. I do question how much data this device can take before shutting down or how many packets it can drop quickly. There tools are called DNSGuard, FloodGuard, MailGuard, IPVerify and TCP intercept.

This firewall can also contact adminstrators real time thru a cell phone SMS or email thru a devich such as a RIM Blackberry.I have read of software that will allow you to SSH to your router, computer thru the Blackberry. Cisco's auditing software is called CiscoWorks Information management Solutions or SIMS.No not the game. It collects and anayzes data from across your network allowing you to prioritize threat levels.

Benjamin Hargis
Phuture Networks
http://www.phuturenetworks.com/
http://www.computersecurityadvice.com/