Interesting article the other day on PhishMe.com – Owning The Mobile Workforce. In it, Schmoilito writes about the vulnerabilities inherent in most SSL VPNs, and the challenges this poses for the growing number of companies with employees working remotely.
We had an opportunity to chat with Rene Poot about his thoughts on the subject. Rene’s comments:
This is a brilliant article; in order to leverage security; you require a firm ‘foothold’ on the device; i.e. a client that can enforce security policies on the machine itself. The idea of ‘clientless’ what SSL VPNs push is in very often in actual fact their ‘Achilles’ heel’! The point you make!
It’s not so much the SSL VPN at fault, SSL protocol itself is a great method to create security tunnels; but it’s the implementation that’s at fault — the atomization as you point out in the article. NCP’s approach of having a client installed, that comes with a dynamically adaptable firewall to fend off malicious attacks, comes with an integrated dialer, to ensure the connection is secure and controlled, and comes with Endpoint Security enforcement to ensure the machine is secured — and then all this with the manageability aspect — the lack of which drove many people away from IPsec and to SSL!
VPN Haus 