It’s actually way more than just a firewall. Blue Lane, which we’ve covered in the past here and here, calls it a virtualized IPS (Intrusion Prevention System). They are about to release extensive additions to their VM protection suite VirtualShield including integration with VMware’s VirtualCenter. By now most data centers have extensive host and network based protection, there’s certainly no shortage of available solutions. But what about those virtual servers and virtual machines that are popping up all over the network? Track down and secure each one of them by hand? - I think not.
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We’ve already discussed the sorry state of affairs for server security along with the related compromise of the perimeter of the network. Gartner recently predicted that 75% of enterprises will be infected by bots by the end of THIS year. Yet no one is shocked. My how the world of network security has changed as we get increasingly interconnected and hackers get increasingly sophisticated.

I suspect that at least half of the few thousand who typically read this column will have received at least one “you’ve been breached” notice. Whether the data was on a laptop, stolen via a hack attack or sold by a frustrated employee the effect is the same. Your identity is exposed. It is a sad reality that we accept these exposures as a part of our increasingly interconnected and commercial lives.
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Securing and keeping up server environments is tedious enough, but what about all these virtual machines that are popping up all over the network? Blue Lane, which I’ve talked about in the past - here and here, might have found a cure for all those VMs wreaking havoc within your network.
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Looks like I’m not the only one who thinks Blue Lane has some very interesting technology. InfoWorld just awarded them the 2007 Technology of the Year Award - Congrats !

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What if you could mimic the function of a patch on the network instead of rushing to test and deploy the actual patch right away? That’s what triggered the whole idea of inline patching. Blue Lane takes a whole new approach to the way we can respond to vulnerabilities that require immediate patching.
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I’ve first learned about Blue Lane when they were still in stealth mode, they operated under a different company name first. Network Computing posted this Interview with Blue Lanes CEO Jeff Palmer. As he points out don’t confuse them with a patch management vendor.

I believe Blue Lane offers a very promising approach to solve the burning issues of reacting to security issues in a controlled manner rather than to deploy untested patches.

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How does it work?

We typically follow the security patches from the vendors. We focus on those applicable to servers and remotely exploitable over the network. Our design emulates, in a context-aware way, the detection logic and correction logic of the vendor’s patch.

The correction logic can vary depending on the vulnerability. In the case of a buffer overflow, the vendor patch may truncate traffic; so we truncate traffic on the wire. In some cases the patch would terminate a session, so if that’s the remedy we would do it as well. In some cases it’s as simple as returning an error message.

So Blue Lane doesn’t apply patches to servers?

We sometimes get confused with patch management or software distribution. We in no way handle the vendor patch. We remediate until it’s realistic for the enterprise to deploy the patch on machines that can be patched. We are an adjunct to a healthy software update process.

The full article can be found here.

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