Check Point Acquisition of Sourcefire Checked by Feds

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Backdoors by design or accident?

Surely you jest, Mr. Stiennon.

In 2000, one year after Check Point's Firewall-1 was certified by the NSA as the only EAL-2 compliant application & traffic firewall product, a group of security researchers ripped the product to shreds in a sobering presentation at the Blackhat Briefings conference in Las Vegas.

Among the gems in their security audit: a zero-knowledge attack against the default authentication protocol where the attacker simply replays the offered challenge as a response in order to gain full administrative control of the system. Every possible avenue of attack for a firewall was realized. Firewall-1 was owned 9 ways to Sunday, from authentication and application proxies to state management and VPN. And they published their 0day exploit code, thankfully a month of frenzied patching later.

For years, firewall wizards such as Marcus Ranum had speculated on the existence of a Mossad backdoor in the Israeli-owned Check Point. This episode confirmed the fact that such backdoors did actually exist, whether intentionally or not, and were able to be successfully exploited in the wild.

Bottom line -- the feds aren't calling the Sourcefire acquisition into question for nothing. Sourcefire has deep penetration in the fed/gov sector, enough to make this a real national security concern. They're doing the right thing.

Posted by: phunk   Posted on: 03/05/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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