Rapid Advances in Technology

Modern aircrafts have wings, fly through the air, and land on the groundand that is about all they have in common with the first airplanes. The advances in airframe design, materials, avionics, navigation and route selection, and airport operations make it difficult to believe that people ever considered getting into the early airplanes.

I would love to say that modern perimeter systems are so advanced that it is inconceivable that we ever tried to protect our systems with those early firewalls, but we haven't made that much progress yet. However, hope prevails, and we certainly see evidence of improvement. Perimeter defense systems have come way down in price for any given bandwidth point; many can be upgraded by just downloading a new image.

Deep packet inspection at gigabit speed is possible right now for the well-funded organization. Subscription models that update daily or weekly are the norm and support an architecture of perimeter components to create hybrid systems that combine classic perimeter defense, reporting sensors, and possibly even vulnerability assessments that allow performing internal correlation.

This book discusses the importance of using the information collected by perimeter devices to help defend the network. The data collected and reported by these devices fuels the most advanced analysis capability in the worldthe Internet Storm Center (ISC). Organizations such as ISC and Internet Security Systems's X-Force are often the first groups to detect a new worm beginning to cause trouble on the Internet. One of the upcoming models for security is continuous reporting, or operational readiness, and this requires sensors all over the network to constantly report in. The technology of network security is dynamic. It's important to have constant updates to maintain security in the face of the ever-changing threat.

It is worth mentioning that ease of use and good security might be orthogonal. If it were as easy to get into an airplane and fly as it is to get into a car and drive, the skies would be a dangerous place. Appliance wireless access points often aggregate all wireless and built-in wired ports into the same broadcast domains. Possibilities for attacks exist based on MAC address spoofing, sniffing the internal traffic from outside the plant in the parking lot, the use of rogue, unapproved access points bought at Best Buy and plugged into the Net, access points with a bit more power than the FTC allows being broadcast into the internal network from the parking lot, and failures of the authentication system. The most common reason for aircraft crashes today is poor maintenance, and we are going to see the same thing with wireless implementations as better security technology becomes available.