Overview
Next-generation firewalls (NGFWs):
After the invention of unified threat management (UTM) and web application firewalls (WAF), the innovation of NGFWs was a new big thing.
These are the third-generation and current standard for firewall technology. These advanced firewalls offers not only the gamut of traditional firewall services but in addition it offers intrusion prevention systems (IPS), deep-packet inspection (DPI), advanced threat protection, and Layer-7 application control technologies.
Constant shifts in application use, user behavior, and network infrastructure have created a threat landscape that continues to expose organizations to an increasing attack surface. Now a days when the cloud technology is growing exponentially, a growing number of applications being hosted to the cloud that can be operated across different devices. With the current state of growing threats these applications has become little critical for the end user, that needs to be secured.
With the continuous modification in the threats, modified security system is also needed to combat these. Juniper Networks SRX Series Services Gateways has integrated next-generation firewalls (NGFW) with application awareness, user identity, and content inspection. The SRX Series NGFW device offers intrusion prevention, SSL inspection, URL filtering, and unknown threat detection.
Network Security for Public and Private Clouds:
The Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) is an ideal solution for visibility, control, and prevention at the network edge. Threat protection starts with efficient monitoring about the network. It can detect the threats in real time.
Juniper delivers the most effective NGFW in the industry. It has multiple high-performance next-generation firewalls that can provide granular control and visibility from client to cloud.
To prevent the malicious attack and breach, both control and visibility are crucial. Juniper NGFW is having the additional security benefits:
Application identification
User identification
Security from network and application exploits
Malware detection and prevention
URL filtering, including blocking malicious web sites
Traffic analysis encryption for the safety of users, applications, and devices
Architecture and Key Components:
User Identification and Access Control
User identity is crucial for next-generation firewalls. It is required for creating the security policies .This technique is very useful for defining, managing, and refining security policies by creating firewall rules based on user identity.
Application Identification and Control
New applications now a days are designed to change ports and protocols dynamically, thus the applications can be used from anywhere, at any time. This feature also helps protecting against constantly changing threat landscape that directly targets applications.
Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDP)
IDP signatures enable the detection-only mode to block malicious traffic. Juniper’s intrusion prevention system (IPS) is integrated with Juniper SRX NGFW to fight against network and application exploits . It constantly monitors for new exploits.
Real-Time Protection
NGFW provides threat intelligence to all points of connection. Here the threat feeds are automated and constantly updated. This feed information is verified by Juniper Threat Labs and high detection efficacy is being maintained.
Block Known Threats
These NGFW can detect and block malware threats at the network level before they make it any endpoint. This protection system has combined the cloud-based file reputation intelligence and malware signature to NGFW.
Browsing Defense
Filtering the web traffic is very important. This feature allows the administrator to block the unwanted URL s.
Encrypted Protection
The universal method SSL is used for authenticating websites, encrypting traffic between Web clients and Web servers.
Unknown Threats
Juniper Advanced Threat Prevention (ATP) is a threat intelligence hub that uses machine learning algorithms for the protections against advanced malware detection and prevention. The SRX Series Services Gateways combined with, Juniper ATP it triggers a global threat database to deliver threat intelligence, dynamic malware analysis, encrypted traffic insights, and adaptive threat profiling. It can be applicable to cloud-based service as well as an on-prem appliance.
It supports protects against Trojans, worms, ransomware, botnets etc.
Features of NGFWs:
Application and Identity Awareness
The NGFWs offers protection at the application and user identity levels on contrary to the traditional firewall that relies on standard application ports. NGFWs’ ability to recognize identity enables the administrator to refine the firewall rules more granularly.
Centralized Management, Visibility, and Auditing
To actively manage a network’s defenses, administrators need an accessible and configurable dashboard to view and manage security systems like NGFWs. In general the NGFWs contain log analysis, policy management, and a management dashboard to track security health, analyze traffic patterns.
Stateful Inspection
NGFWs can track 2-7network layer, where it performs the filtering like a duties of a traditional firewall to separate the safe and unsafe packets.
Deep Packet Inspection
With this feature the traffic inspection goes one step ahead, where it is more targeted than stateful inspection that monitors all the packet headers of the traffic. It’s been executed at the application layer, where DPI can locate, categorize, block, or reroute packets accordingly.
Integrated Intrusion Prevention (IPS)
Intrusion prevention systems (IPS) combines with the firewall, acts as a defender against new threats. IPS devices take care of inspecting, alerting, and even actively ridding malware and intruders from the network.
Network Sandboxing
It is methods of advanced malware protection .In this process a potentially malicious program can be send to a secure, isolated, cloud-based environment to test the malware in-network.
HTTPS, SSL/TLS, and Encrypted Traffic
HTTPS is the current standard for network communication, where the SSL/TLS protocol is used for encrypting. NGFWs are now being used to decrypt SSL and TLS communications. The NGFWs support all inbound and outbound SSL decryption techniques.
Threat Intelligence and Dynamic Lists
NGFWs uses updates from global network about the latest threats and attack to strengthen the compliance policies in real-time. Globally shared Indicators of compromise (IoC) that informs the NGFW about the malicious traffic. Along with these features NGFWs has made the threat hunting more automated and more efficient.
Integration Capacity
Now days with the growth of the complicated threats and introductions of the advanced products business organizations are now incorporating their organization infrastructure with third-party applications. Where these NGFW provides easy integration, which provides less stress for personnel navigating between software. Here the application programming interfaces (API) play a crucial role in policy selection and provisioning where multiple software applications are in use.
Deployment method
Following are the methods for the deployment of NGFW :
For deployment on cloud Public cloud AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platforms are being used.
For deployment on Private cloud HPE, VMWare, Cisco, or NetApp are being used.
For deployment on on-premises (edge) the NGFWs positioned at edge of networks are being used.
For deployment on-premises (internal) the NGFWs that are positioned at internal segment boundaries are being used.
Application:
Business organizations
