How safe is your device?

Be it logging onto your laptop, accessing your document on a scanner or getting a document on a printer, the trustworthiness of your device is of utmost importance. Security concerns led to protocols being set in order to stitch together the concept of Network Access Control (NAC). The main agenda has been to put forth policies that would help you access your network in a much-secured environment.

In an exclusive interview with Prasad Ramasubramanian of CyberMedia News, Stephen Hanna, Distinguished Engineer at Juniper Networks elucidates on the issues facing networks across the world and the road ahead for security related concerns on the web arena. Excerpts:

What is your major area of expertise and how has Juniper grown in the last five years in India?

Most of the work that I do is related to network applicability standards and also I go and work with other engineers inside Juniper to help them boost the level of their participation in the company and also outside of the company. That’s one of the purposes of my visit - to spend time with most senior engineers here in our India engineering center. It’s our fifth anniversary here doing engineering in India. The engineering center has really grown in the last five years. Starting off with 13 people, now we have a workforce of about 900, and had rapid growth in the business. We have other development centers in China, Israel and in the US.

Could you share your thoughts on NAC, its ideologies and its challenges?

Network Access Control is really about integrating different network security components together. So in simple terms, it’s about controlling who can connect to your network… and it’s essential when you put across a network. It’s natural as to who you would want to control and access it and NAC does exactly that.

Could you give an example of the same?

Let’s say you have a legacy network, you cannot let your guests to just come and plug into the network at any point of time. You can’t let your contractors to come in and let them connect to everything. Yes, you can allow them to access a part of their network but not the whole network.

What are the key challenges in network access control?

The challenge in any network is about integration. The basic of network access is integrating authentication and network security. We also want to integrate end-point security and to provide all this is a challenge. This is because it involves products and technologies from different vendors. In a typical enterprise, there would be end points running on Microsoft Windows or a Linux with each of those devices having an anti-virus software probably from a different vendor from the OS (Operating System), a cache management software to manage this machine. Now, these are from different vendors already and they need to be integrated into one single whole. That’s the challenge.

How do you bring across awareness of such practices in to markets such as India?

Juniper has a whole bunch of partners whom we are working with for the small medium size businesses. We have a product line called Unified Access Control (UAC) and the UAC product implements these standards. So it’s a matter of training our partners so that they can go out and educate customer and point out the possibilities of what can be done with the technologies, and then customers, by virtue of that education decide what is best for them.

Your thoughts on the ever-growing threat of cyber crimes?

We are seeing a lot of growth in computing and networking in general leading to growth in cyber crime. The root cause of the problem is that your machine is not trustworthy. Your machine cannot act in the way you told it to act. Now, how can we change that behavior? This is the same problem, which Microsoft (MS) is trying to address with their trustworthy computing initiative. It’s been going on for five years and having spent billions of dollars on this project--it’s still impossible to solve this problem through software alone. The reason for that is, software lies, software can be fooled and software always has bugs in it.

Is there a role for the government for instituting a cross-cultural cyber law?

Yes, definitely. But the problem with a purely legal approach is that it’s hard to get to the head of the curve. And yes we can peak at it but the volume of the problem is so great that we can’t really deliver a law enforcement initiative to match the problem. I am always a big fan to having economic solutions to problems but in this case technical solutions may be better.