Some of the major obstacles we face with 802.1X center around creating a smooth end user experience.  We, as integrators, have the distinct ability to make ‘whatever’ work- we find a way. But, what I hear most from my customers is “it has to be easy for the end user.”  (Sometimes they go on a little further, but I’ll leave it at that.)

Why does it matter?

Wireless, wireless, wireless. Although wired 1X is popular with our customer-base, the world isn’t quite flocking to it yet. However, 802.1X is certainly the best way to increase security and ease management of wireless networks. It’s standard, it’s flexible, it’s widely-supported by devices and endpoints and it eliminates the need for pre-shared keys or secondary passwords. It’s what most enterprises, government and educational organizations are implementing now, so it’s important.

What are some of the problems?

The end user will have some adjustments to make, and network admins and support desks aren’t always thrilled with the propect of re-training users for these expectations.

Like most of the service providers we talk to, they look to virtualization to provide immediate benefits to the business – e.g, cost savings from server consolidation and support for Green IT through cutting power/cooling requirements. And one more dimension to virtualization – Opus launched a new service, vClustr, which is a virtual dedicated server that provides the benefits of a fully managed dedicated server at a fraction of the cost…managed by EM7, of course.

We were happy to help Opus by working with them to implement our EM7 solution. Their growth plan was severely limited by inefficient processes and tools. As Opus grew rapidly in 2006, the tools they had in place were not easy to integrate as they were managed independently. There was a manual billing and ticketing infrastructure in place, and valuable engineer time was spent on maintaining what they had instead of enabling business growth. The company faced a choice, either grow by adding overhead and bodies or grow through automation.

Opus chose automation. They needed an automated solution to cover their immediate needs, and also enable them to scale processes for emerging technologies and future service offerings. Throughout their growth, Opus wanted to maintain their “customer first” philosophy and expand their green efforts.

By choosing EM7, Opus was able to replace their multiple, disparate tools with a single, integrated management system for networks, servers, applications, service desk assets and virtualization infrastructure. EM7 provided automated billing, ticketing, alerts and escalation options as well as a branded customer portal for transparency and self-service ticketing.

The results were tremendous. Opus Interactive recouped $130k per year of engineering resources. They automated critical operations to increase efficiency, enabled proactive monitoring and prepared for growth, while giving the business the processes and tools to grow the business without additional human capital resources.

We’re glad that we could help such a great company achieve their goals of providing an efficient “best-in-class” solution that combined superior customer service with a green philosophy.

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By now you have probably heard that Brocade is making a big push from storage networking switches into Ethernet switches by buying Foundry Networks for almost 3 billion in cash.  Actually the deal is valued at about 2.8 billion.  However, Foundry has about 800 million or so in cash and liquid assets.  So taking that into account, the deal is for about 2 billion really, according to the San Jose Mercury News. Still that is quite a number when you consider that $18.50 of the $19.25 price per share is in cash.  That works out to about 2.7 billion.  Considering Brocade only had about 700 to 800 million in cash itself, that means someone is lending them about a billion and half.  Again according the Mercury News, it is Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. This is a 41% premium over Foundry's closing price.  Pretty sweet!

The real question is what does Brocade do with this.  With all of that debt, do they have what it takes to go on and take on Cisco now?  The highways and byways of Silicon Valley are littered with companies that have tried to take Cisco out of this market.  What about the 7 dwarfs who currently compete in this market.  Companies like HP ProCurve, Extreme Networks, Nortel, Enterasys, Alcatel-Lucent and Force 10 are not small little companies. These are companies with 100's of millions, if not billions of dollars of market cap themselves.  They are not going to roll over and die here. Will this set off a round of consolidation for these players to bulk up in order to compete in this brave new world of networking? I think so. What about next gen secure switches like ConSentry, Nevis and Napera? Or some of the other smaller switch vendors like D-link?  Do they view this a a good opportunity to get bought by one of the giants or do they think they can run through the legs of these giants?  I don't know but it is going to be a high barrier of entry into this market.

Ultimately though I don't think Cisco will lose its place of dominance very easily. Brocade will be another competitor among the other switch vendors fighting over 25% of the market. But it sure will be interesting in the switch market for a while.

If someone is simultaneously watching a user’s traffic as it enters and leaves the network, it is possible to de-anonymise the communication. This could occur if the first and last node for a connection is controlled by the same person. Tor takes some steps to avoid this possibility e.g. no two computers on the same /16 network may be chosen for each connection. However, someone with access to several networks could circumvent this measure.

Not only is route selection critical for security, but it’s also a significant performance factor. Tor nodes vary dramatically in their capacity, mainly due to their network connections. If all nodes were chosen with equal likelihood, the slower ones would cripple the network. This is why Tor weights the selection probability for a node proportional to its contribution to the network bandwidth.

Because of the dual importance of route selection, there are a number of proposals which offer an alternative to Tor’s bandwidth-weighted algorithm. Later this week at PETS I’ll be presenting my paper, co-authored with Robert N.M. Watson, “Metrics for security and performance in low-latency anonymity systems”. In this paper, we examine several route selection algorithms and evaluate their security and performance.

Intuitively, a route selection algorithm which weights all nodes equally appears the most secure because an attacker can’t make their node count any more than the others. This has been formalized by two measures: Gini coefficient and entropy. In fact the reality is more complex — uniform node selection resists attackers with lots of bandwidth, whereas bandwidth-weighting is better against attackers with lots of nodes.

Our paper explores the probability of path compromise of different route selection algorithms, when under attack by a range of different adversaries. We find that none of the proposals are optimal against all adversaries, and so summarizing effective security in terms of a single figure is not feasible. We also model the performance of the schemes and show that bandwidth-weighting offers both low latency and high resistance to attack by bandwidth-constrained adversaries.

Recently several NAC customers have been stepping up and talking about how they use NAC and why. Last week there was a good article on Estee Lauder using NAC first for guest access control and most recently an expansion of their NAC deployment to help with PCI compliance.  This week in an article with the usual left-handed compliments, Tim Greene in between quotes by the so called analyst experts, talks about several NAC companies rolling out NAC.  One is American Bancard, another StillSecure customer who uses NAC to help with PCI and keep their network secure. The article talks about several other companies using NAC solutions from other vendors as well, which is also very encouraging.  Of course the companies I have spoken about I know for a fact are using NAC.  With some of the competition, you cannot always be sure as I have written about in the past.

In any event, I think it is important that we are starting to see some real public references for NAC deployments.  Nothing proves the point of a products value than real live customers stepping up and talking about it!