Security firewall one step ahead

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

Canadian-based BorderWare Technologies hopes its Firewall Server package will be further accepted by security-conscious Governments now that it has won a Common Criteria EAL4 security certification.

The Common Criteria Scheme involves a consortium of countries, including the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany and Australia, which have agreed on common security standards. The EAL4 rating is the fourth-highest of seven classifications.

BorderWare's European vice-president, Peter Cox, who was in Auckland last week to meet the New Zealand distributors, said the market for firewalls - programs that prevent unauthorised access to company or Government networks via the internet - was becoming crowded.

The EAL4 rating puts BorderWare's firewall ahead of competing products such as Check Point's FireWall-1 and Cisco's Pix, which have so far only reached EAL2 level.

BorderWare estimates its installed base has reached 5000 to 6000 users worldwide, of which about 300 are based in New Zealand.

The company's two local distributors are Extranet Technologies and Kaon Technologies.

Up to now, the main markets for firewalls have been Governments and large companies, but late last year BorderWare launched a small business edition in an attempt to broaden its customer base.

However, one factor that may hinder mass-market sales of firewall products generally is that they take a long time to install.

Most firewalls work by intercepting packets of data as they are transmitted and matching them against known domain names and internet protocol addresses before deciding whether to allow them to proceed.

Setting all the known internal addresses up can be a difficult and time-consuming process.

"The person configuring it must know what they are doing do some extent," admits Mr Cox, but he says Firewall Server can be installed in two hours.