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A new approach to improving system security is to improve firewall security. To do that, many vendors are looking to integrate IPS (intrusion prevention systems) with firewalls, essentially creating a smarter firewall.

According to this article at eWeek, this is in response to threats becoming increasingly complex and which keep attacking higher up the network stack, forcing firewalls to improve their management and configuration tools. But this all has to be done without taking a step back in terms of latency and throughput of basic firewall functions.

This is part of the trend of integration security products into a more complete solution for threat management, with Cisco’s ASA and Juniper’s SSG being good examples. This also comes in response to corporate users installing both business and personal applications that are often designed to circumvent legacy network firewalls.

In essence, enterprises have essentially lost control of their connections, which Palo Alto Networks, and it’s recently released PA-4000 series, can identify application traffic across ports, addresses. PA-4000 can open the SSL links to identify an application, or perform deep packet inspection, apply filters and enforce policies based on the application

Cisco’s technology also seeks to integrate reputation technology into a firewall. Said Tom Gillis, vice president of marketing for Cisco, "In the first release of that, which will be in the first half of 2008, [it] will allow you to provide visibility into these connections so you can see how many clients are in your network that are connecting to servers that are known to be botnet control nodes," Gillis said, adding that users would be able to block, throttle or deny connections considered suspect.

"Future firewalls are going to have the ability to route traffic through the appropriate scanning measure based on the reputation of the connecting server," Gillis said. "The firewall is effectively the traffic cop."

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