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Major Device Manufacturer Relies on Cenzic Hailstorm Platform for Vulnerability Research

Enterasys Networks, Inc. develops and markets an extensive portfolio of enterprise devices, including switches, routers, VPNs, wireless solutions, network-management tools and intrusion detection systems.

Enterasys engineers use the Cenzic Hailstorm platform for enterprise-level security quality assurance for two distinct purposes. One is to create successful attacks on a variety of software systems so that Enterasys can incorporate defenses against those attacks into its own network-protection products. The other use is to show Enterasys customers how attacks occur, then demonstrate the effectiveness of Enterasys products against those attacks.

"We've been using Cenzic Hailstorm a long time," says Research Engineer Gary Golomb of Enterasys. "And we've been very satisfied with it."

Golomb said Cenzic Hailstorm's ability to generate successful attacks — and thus expose software vulnerability — has proved beneficial to strengthening Enterasys's own intrusion detection systems (IDS), including its award-winning Dragon IDS products.

"Exploits are constantly being announced -— saying that a particular software package is vulnerable to an attack — but there won't be any more details than that," Golomb explains. "We'll figure out what's vulnerable in that package by using Cenzic Hailstorm to generate the traffic to accomplish it. Based on what we find, we can then generate the recognition patterns in our own IDS."

The Cenzic Hailstorm platform's proprietary fault-generation engine generates huge amounts of network traffic specifically to penetrate faults and vulnerabilities. "In this sense, we're using it for vulnerability research," Golomb says.

But Enterasys Networks - headquartered in Portsmouth, N.H., and with offices in more than 30 countries - also has found another beneficial use for Cenzic Hailstorm, according to Golomb.

"Some of our field engineers are using it to show customers, quickly and easily, how an attack occurs," he says. "Cenzic Hailstorm is easy for the sales engineers to use, and they have hundreds of attacks at their disposal. As a sales tool, it's an effective way to generate traffic for our systems and routers and demonstrate it to customers."

Still, the largest use of the Cenzic Hailstorm platform by Enterasys is in finding faults and vulnerabilities. "We use it on all software applications that touch a network," Golomb says.