The company launched the Advanced Edition of the product, a $23,000 4U appliance designed to allow remote users access to web-enabled applications without the need for any client software beyond a regular SSL-enabled browser.
Several upgrades in the latest version are designed to make it more secure when users access their company’s applications from shared PCs such as those found in internet cafes, Whale CEO Elad Baron said.
We see many competitors with roadmaps trying to be as close as possible to IPSec VPNs, Baron said. We think that’s a mistake. SSL VPNs and IPSec VPNs are very different things.
The key update in the new e-Gap is Attachment Wiper, an ActiveX applet that downloads when a user logs in and cleans up all traces of their session – such as the URL history and data cached by the browser – when they log off.
The system can be configured to refuse to allow users to download potentially confidential email attachments if ActiveX is disabled on the remote PC. Automatic timed (and prompted) session timeouts are also there in case of users forgetting to log off.
The SSL VPN market is expected to hit $1bn by 2006, according to a report out earlier this week from Infonetics Research, and most vendors in the space are selling the second or third versions of their products.
Whale’s appliance differs from competitors’ primarily in that it is actually two computers in one box, separated by an air-gap data switch that ensures that back-end systems are never exposed to the internet.
In the Whale system the first computer strips TCP headers from incoming data, preventing network-level attacks entering the back end, then passes the payload to the second computer, which scans for application-level threats.
Source: Computerwire
