Dark Reading is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them.Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Database Security
Authentication
Mobile
Privacy
Compliance
Careers and People
Identity & Access Management
Security Monitoring
Advanced Threats
Insider Threats
Vulnerability Management
Comments
The Performance Penalties of Bloatware-Based Next-Gen Firewalls
Newest First  |  Oldest First  |  Threaded View
MichaelFey
MichaelFey,
 User Rank: Apprentice
11/4/2014 | 6:37:34 PM
Re: Smaller Footprint, Bigger Thinking

There are two concepts here – one is core product design, another is deployment optimization. Bloatware is traditionally used to mean OS and applications that grow fatter and more sluggish with each FCS. As part of bloatware deployment, optimization can be a useful tool for tailoring a product to the specific policies, traffic patterns, and risk posture of your organization and network topology. However, it is also often a crutch used to work around poor designs, finessing features and options into the optimal set of tradeoffs. Yet they are still tradeoffs -- something is lost.

Instead, we think you have the right to buy a product that works efficiently out of the box, without heavy optimization. If you have the time, budget, and desire to optimize, you can still choose to do so, but I prefer to see products that perform well at the default settings – with all the features you've invested in turned on.

RetiredUser
RetiredUser,
 User Rank: Ninja
10/31/2014 | 12:59:35 PM
Smaller Footprint, Bigger Thinking
When I first walked into a past project - create a new OS template VM for all future SLES VM rollouts - I knew I was going to take the existing installation footprint and cut it down from almost 10 GB to roughly 1 GB.  When a second template came up for our virtual firewall "appliances" I took that 1 GB and made it 600 MB.  My point is, from strictly a size factor, I understood how to review from a configuration/release management perspective all the applications and libraries contained in the VM and whittle the package down to only the most essential packages.

Now, in terms of performance, it's a similar thing.  You identify exactly what you need in your firewall, what you can replace with intermittant services rather than persistant, and also what can be replaced with pure staff power; re-design and roll out with only what you need; the understanding being that you do not turn anything off later without replacing it with another form of that service, or a modified version.  But also, performance can be affected by the software itself - not all algorithms are equal and before buying deep analytics that are going to sit on your network, you should understand the code and whether there are better options out there; even bringing an in-house team to write the code so the footprint is small and the drag on performance is as minimal as possible may be worth the money in the long run.

Trim all the digital fat, and make sure only the best designed code is in place.

P.S.  I suspect that of those admins interviewed, many of them didn't fully understand the options available in their software.  Even bloatware can often be configurable to minimize features and for performance fine-tuning.  Know your apps backward and forward, spend time with the application tech support to identify areas for improvement, and if that isn't working - buy another product.

 


Edge-DRsplash-10-edge-articles
I Smell a RAT! New Cybersecurity Threats for the Crypto Industry
David Trepp, Partner, IT Assurance with accounting and advisory firm BPM LLP,  7/9/2021
News
Attacks on Kaseya Servers Led to Ransomware in Less Than 2 Hours
Robert Lemos, Contributing Writer,  7/7/2021
Commentary
It's in the Game (but It Shouldn't Be)
Tal Memran, Cybersecurity Expert, CYE,  7/9/2021
Register for Dark Reading Newsletters
White Papers
Video
Cartoon
Current Issue
Incorporating a Prevention Mindset into Threat Detection and Response
Threat detection and response systems, by definition, are reactive because they have to wait for damage to be done before finding the attack. With a prevention-mindset, security teams can proactively anticipate the attacker's next move, rather than reacting to specific threats or trying to detect the latest techniques in real-time. The report covers areas enterprises should focus on: What positive response looks like. Improving security hygiene. Combining preventive actions with red team efforts.
Flash Poll
Twitter Feed
Dark Reading - Bug Report
Bug Report
Enterprise Vulnerabilities
From DHS/US-CERT's National Vulnerability Database
CVE-2022-25878
PUBLISHED: 2022-05-27
The package protobufjs before 6.11.3 are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution which can allow an attacker to add/modify properties of the Object.prototype. This vulnerability can occur in multiple ways: 1. by providing untrusted user input to util.setProperty or to ReflectionObject.setParsedOption ...
CVE-2021-27780
PUBLISHED: 2022-05-27
The software may be vulnerable to both Un-Auth XML interaction and unauthenticated device enrollment.
CVE-2021-27781
PUBLISHED: 2022-05-27
The Master operator may be able to embed script tag in HTML with alert pop-up display cookie.
CVE-2022-1897
PUBLISHED: 2022-05-27
Out-of-bounds Write in GitHub repository vim/vim prior to 8.2.
CVE-2022-20666
PUBLISHED: 2022-05-27
Multiple vulnerabilities in the web-based management interface of Cisco Common Services Platform Collector (CSPC) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to conduct a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack against a user of the interface. These vulnerabilities are due to insufficient va...