Sophos “Xstream” XG Firewall Enables Monitoring of TLS Encrypted Data Streams

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Date : 24-Feb-2020
Location: Kuala Lumpur

Key Takeaways:
  • Sophos launches “Xstream” architecture for Sophos XG Firewall with high performance Transport Layer Security (TLS) traffic decryption capabilities that eliminate significant security risk associated with encrypted network traffic, which is often overlooked by security teams due to performance and complexity concerns.
  • Sophos today also published the SophosLabs Uncut article, “Nearly a Quarter of Malware now Communicates Using TLS,” which explains how 23% of malware families use encrypted communication for Command and Control (C2) or installation - example: Trickbot, IcedID and Dridex.


 Spokepersons:
  • Dan Schiappa, chief product officer at Sophos, said, most firewalls lack scalable TLS crypto capabilities and are unable to inspect encrypted traffic without causing applications to break or degrade network performance.
  • Eric Parizo, senior analyst for enterprise IT strategy, Omdia, said, XG Firewall can win against industry competitors in large part because of Sophos Central, its SaaS-based, single-pane-of-glass management system for overseeing deployment, management, policy, updates, and response, with optional log management and analytics.
  • Bruce Kneece, CTO of Columbia, said, the ability to monitor SSL/TLS encrypted data streams is second to none.
Offering:
  • XG Firewall now also features AI-enhanced threat analysis from SophosLabs and accelerated application performance.
  • Key new features of XG Firewall include:
    • Inspection of TLS 1.3 to detect cloaked malware: New port-agnostic TLS engine doubles crypto operation performance over previous XG versions
    • Optimized critical application performance: New FastPath policy controls accelerate performance of SD-WAN applications and traffic, including Voice over IP, SaaS and others, to up to wire speed
    • Adaptive traffic scanning: The newly enhanced Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) engine dynamically risk-assesses traffic streams and matches them to the appropriate threat scanning level, enhancing throughput by up to 33% across most network environments
    • Threat analysis with SophosLabs intelligence: Provides network administrators with the SophosLabs AI-enhanced threat analysis needed to understand and adjust defenses to protect against a constantly changing threat landscape
    • Comprehensive cloud management and reporting in Sophos Central: Centralized management and reporting capabilities in Sophos Central provide customers with group firewall management and flexible cloud reporting across an entire estate without additional charge
    • Integration with Sophos Managed Threat Response (MTR) service: Customers of XG Firewall who also subscribe to the Sophos MTR Advanced service will have deeper actionable intelligence to prevent, detect and respond to threats, as a result of the integration
  • Sophos XG Firewall is available in the cloud-based Sophos Central platform alongside Sophos’ entire portfolio of next-generation cybersecurity solutions. Sophos’ unique Synchronized Security approach empowers these solutions to work together for real-time information sharing and threat response.

Insights:
  • Cybercriminals also use TLS to hide their exploits, payloads and stolen content and to avoid detection. In fact, 44% of prevalent information stealers use encryption to sneak hijacked data, including bank and financial account passwords and other sensitive credentials, out from under organizations.
  • Latency too often deters IT admins from using decryption, as seen in an independent Sophos survey of 3,100 IT managers in 12 countries. The survey white paper, The Achilles Heel of Next-Gen Firewalls, reports that while 82% of respondents agreed TLS inspection is necessary, only 3.5% of organizations are decrypting their traffic to properly inspect it.
Best Practices:
  • With the new Xstream architecture in XG Firewall, Sophos is providing critical visibility into an enormous blind spot while eliminating frustrating latency and compatibility issues with full support for the latest TLS 1.3 standard.
Editor's comments:
  • Many servers had the TLS 1.3 disabled in order to support legacy systems, likewise, many apps are not fully compatible with TLS 1.3.
  • The ability of malware to tap into the power of TLS 1.3 to carry out their operations is impressive, it clearly shows that cybercriminals are no amateur.

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