PT NGFW

2024: Inclusion in the register of Russian software

PT NGFW is included in the unified register of Russian software. Positive Technologies reported this on February 12, 2024.

{{quote 'We are developing Russian INFORMATION SECURITY a -product, so we must go through all the integral stages of entering the market: getting into the register Russian software, certification FSTEC and much more, - said Denis Korablev, Managing Director, Product Director, Positive Technologies. - But the steps taken by the PT NGFW team to develop a high-performance firewall of the latest generation are no less important, since our goals are large-scale - by 2026, according to our forecasts, which are supported by the CSR report, the NGFW market size will amount to 120 billion rubles. And we plan to occupy at least half of this market.}}

Positive Technologies has laid a strong technological foundation in the product, based on the experience of the best network engineers and developers. From the very beginning of the development process, the PT NGFW team eliminates artificial limitations in functionality and takes into account errors from other manufacturers so that the firewall from Positive Technologies can stably filter all traffic.

Thanks to its own development, the performance of PT NGFW is comparable to leading foreign counterparts. The conclusions are made on the basis of information from official documents of manufacturers of similar devices. To demonstrate the work under load, two platforms were chosen - the younger model on the 4-core Intel Atom and the older model on the two 24-core Intel Xeon. At the same time, the test conditions were tougher than those usually created by Russian developers, and corresponded to RFC 9411, the world standard for testing firewalls. As a result, the performance of PT NGFW with IPS and TLS enabled inspection on the younger model was 800 Mbps, and on the large model - more than 20 Gbps. In application-controlled firewall mode, PT NGFW exhibits throughput greater than 100 Gb/s. Such performance indicators were previously considered unattainable on the x86 platform and comparable to the figures of foreign solutions, on specialized platforms with hardware acceleration.

The second early version of PT NGFW introduced built-in IPS rules based on the accumulated expertise of the PT Expert Security Center (Positive Technologies security expert center), which has already proven itself in the PT Network Attack Discovery (PT NAD) product. IPS is deeply embedded in the traffic processing pipeline and allows you to check threats in encrypted traffic after decrypting it.

In addition to the IPS system, the product already has virtual contexts that allow you to divide one physical device into several independent logical ones with its own administration policies and security rules. With this feature, you can make multiple firewalls from a single NGFW, customize the product to meet business requirements, and in some cases reduce hardware costs.

2023

Positive Technologies hired former Cisco and Palo Alto employees to create its own NGFW

To develop its own NGFWPositive Technologies, it has recruited a new team of specialists who previously worked in international leading vendors, such as Cisco and Palo Alto, told TAdviser on November 23, 2023 at Moscow Hacking Week Anna Komsha, head of business development at NGFW in Positive Technologies.

The next generation firewall is a complex product that cannot be implemented with a click of your fingers. This requires not only expertise in the field of information security, but also network expertise, says Anna Komsha. Positive Technologies, whose flagship direction is SIEM, has already accumulated a large expertise in information security. And in order to make history with NGFW, a new team was formed, which was recruited from former employees of world manufacturers whose portfolio includes firewalls.

We are talking about developers and all engineering piping. Some of the new employees previously worked in Russian development centers for international vendors, and some worked in Russian companies on large projects for foreign vendors.

The team includes, for example, a group of network engineers related to R&D who previously worked at Palo Alto. There are also employees who worked at Cisco. The team includes specialists involved in the development of high-load DPI systems (Deep Packet Inspection).

In November 2024, Positive Technologies plans to release a full-featured NGFW-class commercial product "(Picture: TAdviser)"

And Anna Komsha herself previously worked in Cisco, was engaged in the development of the company's core business in the Russian and CIS markets, which includes switches, routers, access points and software-defined technologies. After leaving Cisco, she managed to work at Kaspersky Lab before joining Positive Technologies in 2023.

As of November, NGFW at Positive Technologies is being developed by a team of about 30 people. For a large product, this is not such a large number, but there are advantages in this: the team is well-managed and can move faster than bloated, notes Anna Komsha.

Another plus of the team is that all these 30 people are stars. Everyone involved in the team and presenting products are people who Google very easily, "added the head of business development at NGFW in Positive Technologies. - We have strong developers, analysts, and engineers.

The company aims to create a firewall operating at very high speeds that could technologically compete with solutions from this class of global vendors. Anna Komsha notes that Positive Technologies sets itself the task of not only closing the basic need of customers, but also making a product for the data center protection market. In the NGFW segment, providing speeds of more than 100 Gbps, after the departure of foreign vendors, a vacuum formed in Russia.

In October 2023, Positive Technologies announced the start of sales of its NGFW in Early Adopters mode, i.e. early implementations for customers who are satisfied with the current product functionality in their existing network scheme. Now the company works with large customers in pilot projects. By the new year, there will be more than a dozen organizations with pilots, Anna Komsha estimates. Among them are not only state customers who are obliged to import replace firewalls, but also commercial organizations that see for themselves the risks of continuing to use foreign products.

Customers are now testing an early version of NGFW, which allows packet filtering at the L4 level, application recognition. In addition, the company recently showed new features such as IPS. IPS is one of the most sought-after features, according to research by Positive Technologies.

At the stage of implementing NGFW of its own development now and in Positive Technologies itself, Anna Komsha told TAdviser: "we expect that by about May next year PT NGFW will be fully implemented in the Positive Technologies infrastructure."

And in 2024, the company expects to release a version that, according to the company's estimates, will satisfy more than half of customers on the Russian market. In particular, a full-featured commercial product is scheduled for November 2024.

One of the currently problematic links in the creation of NGFW is hardware. Positive Technologies is moving towards certification, FSTEC according to the requirements of which the hardware platform must be necessarily in, in register of industrial products produced in the territory of the Russian Federation accordance with the 719-PP. In this regard, they say in the company, Positive Technologies is now working with the largest Russian factories, whose hardware platforms are already in the register, took them for tests and choose. register of domestic software Ministry of Digital Development And in the fall of 2023, an application was filed for inclusion, software which is used in PT NGFW.

The company does not stop at Russian hardware developments alone, because there is also a fairly large commercial market, which now does not require mandatory certification, but requires the most modern components in hardware platforms. Foreign platforms are also considered for them. They are now awaiting testing to test performance.

Anna Komsha notes that their company continues to look for talented people. The market lacks solutions not only with NGFW, which is on everyone's lips, but a large number of network products. The company is also thinking about developing in this direction. This is, for example, NAC solutions (Network Access Control). This is closely related to NGFW and security, but first of all it is a network solution, which is most often not present in the portfolios of information security vendors.

NGFW-class products are also developed by a number of other Russian companies, including UserGate, Security Code, Solar, etc.

Early version

At the Positive Hack Days 12 cyber festival in May 2023, Positive Technologies introduced an early version of PT NGFW, a next-generation firewall for filtering traffic and protecting information from intruders.

We estimate the NGFW market in Russia at 110 billion rubles, "says Denis Korablev, Managing Director, Product Director of Positive Technologies. - Judging by the feedback received at PHD, we can confidently occupy at least half of the market.

The company plans to start the first pilot projects with loyal customers in November 2023.

2022: Development Begins

The development of its own (next-generation firewall, NGFW) in Positive Technologies began in 2022 and, according to the company, is being carried out from scratch by the development team with the involvement of its own investments, which are estimated at at least 750 million rubles^[1].

Until February 2022, there were strong NGFW supplier players on the market, our customers were protected. Now we cannot stand aside - Western manufacturers have practically left the market, and customers are de jure, and sometimes de facto left without protection, "said Denis Korablev, Managing Director and Product Director of Positive Technologies.

NGFW is an understanding modern firewall, or a hardware and software suite of tools for protecting information from intruders and filtering traffic. Instead of dynamic IP addresses and port numbers, NGFW can operate on users and applications.

The creation of NGFW Positive Technologies will be based on the experience of creating firewall the PT Application level of web applications, the Firewall PT NAD deep network traffic analysis system, the experience of the PT Expert Security Center and the PT SWARM investigation team cyber attacks and penetration testing projects of leading companies. Russia

See also

Firewall

What the next generation firewalls are capable of and who needs. NGFW Concept Analysis

Notes