Chapter 6. Understanding CSA Components and Installation

This chapter covers the following topics:

• General CSA Agent components overview

• CSA installation requirements

• Agent kits

The Cisco Security Agent (CSA) is a complex architecture that can enforce enterprise security policies by granularly controlling endpoint behavior. Although technical and security expertise is required to configure, control, and monitor the deployment, it takes very little remote user knowledge of such topics to successfully use the product. In most cases, users have very little interaction with the product and typically are completely unaware of the protection the product is providing their system. Occasionally, the local CSA prompts the user for a response regarding an action that might be normal or malicious or even displays temporary balloon messages to the user about actions that are taking place. In general, however, you should keep the interaction between the user and CSA at a minimum, and generally the user will continue unaffected by the dangers lurking on the network.

Other than the installation of the product, which can be scripted through various methods, the user may never need to interact with the product if that is the desired outcome. Through the application of effective tuning mechanisms, discussed in Chapter 12, "Creating and Tuning Policy," you can get the implemented policy to a point where protective mechanisms are enforced and yet users have no interaction with the product at all. Security administrators use the CSA MC to configure all parameter assignments of the agent and its personalized policies. Optionally, as a new feature in version 4.5, the administrator can allow end users to view and use an advanced user interface (UI) that allows the user on the endpoint to control some of the policy enforced on the local workstation, such as personal firewall rules. If that is not desired, you do not need to deploy this interactive capability to all users in the architecture, or any at all.

In this chapter, you continue to gain an understanding of the CSA architecture through an exploration of the agent software components, protocol communication, and installation.