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Guardent To Sell Snort And Nessus

Posted by timothy on from the you-shore-got-a-purty-box dept.

Cally writes: "An interesting article appeared on the Info-Sec News list the other day about Guardent's new security appliance. Based on Snort, Nessus and IPTables, Guardent are taking the unusal step of trying to sell a product based on Free software into the highly resistant corporate security market. Although Free/Open security software is widely acknowledged to be better than commercial alternatives, it's rarely been trusted in the enterprise - the article points out that, although the NSA use Free software, the need for an expensive government audit prevents the government from saving money and improving security."

3 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Re:FreeBSD network Stack by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 4, Informative
    It's not quite right to refer to the Windows IP stack as FreeBSD.

    Like almost every IP implementation, the one in Win32 is heavily based on the Berkeley Net4 code. This is hardly surprising. The Berkeley implementation was TCP/IP - long before ther were others. Large blocks of the original Berkeley Net code appear to be copied unmodified in the NT/2000/XP system. This is probably true of AIX, Solaris, etc...

    This is a feature of the Berkeley licence.

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  2. Not as uncommon as you might think... by kcbrown · · Score: 3, Informative
    ...though the open source roots of many products are not likely to be widely known.

    There are probably countless "hardware" boxes that use FreeBSD or some other BSD derivative as a base. The company takes that base and adds their own code to do whatever it is that would be unique to the box, then sells the result as a hardware solution. The box itself might have a lot of proprietary hardware in it, or it might not. That'll just depend on the box.

    But either way, open source probably powers a lot more of the hardware (routers, proxies, firewalls, etc.) than the average PHB would expect.

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  3. Nothing new by klaun · · Score: 3, Informative

    SecureWorks has been selling their iSensor product for some time now. It is also based on OpenSource Software using Snort and IPChains. The product comes with monitoring and constant signature updates for the IDS functionality, so that could be seen as the "value-add" for buying what is basically a bunch of free software in a PC box.