Johannesburg, 07 Mar 2011
Qualys, the leading provider of on demand IT security risk and compliance management solutions, and sold exclusively in South Africa by Value Added Service (VAS) reseller Magix Security, has announced IronBee, a new open source project to provide the next-generation of Web application firewall (WAF) technology.
Led by the team who designed and built ModSecurity, the new project aims to produce a Web application firewall sensor that is secure, high-performing, portable, and freely available - even for commercial use. Hosted at the Web site www.ironbee.com, the project is open to all parties interested in joining the development effort.
“This presents huge opportunities for the South African market,” says Alan Rehbock, sales and marketing director at Magix Security. “Data security will continue to present a challenge to all businesses and we urge local security developers to not only join in the collaboration efforts, but to also show the global development market the high level of our IT security skills.”
A WAF is typically an appliance, server plug-in, or software-based filter that applies a set of rules to an HTTP conversation in order to monitor and control the movement of data, thus keeping it secure from possible attacks.
By customising the rules of a WAF, many attacks can be identified and blocked. The increasing use of Web applications and the transition to cloud computing makes it necessary to deploy WAF technology to protect data and meet compliance regulations such as PCI. With the launch of IronBee, Qualys is creating a sustainable community for commercial and open source contributors that will ensure that companies of all sizes are able to use next-generation WAF technology to protect their data and IT assets.
“We are excited about the unveiling of the IronBee open source Web application firewall project,” said John Summers, vice-president of product management for Akamai Technologies. “Akamai and Qualys share a vision that Web security must evolve to become an intercommunicating ecosystem of controls located both in the cloud and within the user's infrastructure. The IronBee project helps drive the industry in that direction, and Akamai looks forward to contributing to the IronBee initiative to help deal with the escalating number and sophistication of web application attacks.”
IronBee will provide:
* State-of-the-art application security inspection engine that provides new processing tools and analysis for HTTP traffic.
* Apache Software License v2, a non-viral open source licence that allows individuals and commercial organisations alike to participate, creating a community of users as well as a community of developers.
* Portability, built from the ground up to work in multiple deployment modes, such as passive, embedded, out of process, and reverse proxy.
* Modular architecture, enabling contributors to easily implement their own modules without requiring deep understanding of the IronBee architecture, as well as allowing straightforward packaging of configuration information and modules appropriate to user needs.
* Community collaboration effort in order to capture, centralise and share the information needed to defend Web applications.
“Due to the proliferation of cloud computing and Web applications, it is quite obvious that no single company alone can fight the sophistication of attacks we are now facing,” said Philippe Courtot, Chairman and CEO for Qualys. “We are now enthused to introduce IronBee as an open source project so we can leverage the collective intelligence of the community to develop a cloud-based WAF with a diverse rule set that can help protect us all against cyber attacks.”
For more information, including a whitepaper about IronBee, please visit www.ironbee.com