Encryption protects the privacy and integrity of data, but also creates a blind spot that attackers can exploit to evade security controls. Considering roughly half of all Internet traffic today is encrypted, it creates a rather large gap in an organization's security posture, leading to increased vulnerability and risk, as well as a damaged reputation. The Symantec SSL Visibility Appliance, a key component of the Encrypted Traffic Management solution set, enables organizations to costeffectively eliminate blind spots within their environment and maximize the effectiveness of their security infrastructure investments. With Symantec, organizations have the visibility and control they need over encrypted traffic to ensure compliance with their privacy, regulatory and acceptable use policies.
Provides Visibility into Encrypted Traffic to Improve Security
The SSL Visibility Appliance is an integral component to any organization's traffic management strategy, providing visibility into encrypted traffic that ensures attacks cannot slip by undetected. Symantec identifies and decrypts all SSL connections and applications across all network ports (even irregular ports). The decrypted feeds can be used by the existing security infrastructure to strengthen their ability to detect and protect against advanced threats; by offloading process intensive decryption, the SSL Visibility Appliance also helps improve the overall performance of the organization's network and security infrastructure.
Supports Privacy and Compliance Initiatives
The SSL Visibility Appliance serves as an effective policy enforcement point to control SSL traffic throughout the enterprise, reducing risks posed by encrypted traffic, while maintaining compliance with relevant privacy policies and regulatory requirements. Utilizing Host Categorization and SSL traffic types for policies, organizations can easily create and customize granular policies to selectively decrypt traffic to meet their business needs (e.g. "do not encrypt financial or banking traffic going out of the business"). And policies can easily be set to control obsolete or weak ciphers and standards - such as traffic using SSL v3.0.
This enables organizations to focus on the communications that represent the highest risks effectively balancing security with data privacy and compliance requirements. These policies also utilize Symantec's market-leading Global Intelligence Network to exchange and update SSL host categorization, threat and malware knowledge across the globe.
Delivers Unmatched Performance and Scale
The SSL Visibility Appliances operate at line-rate, providing visibility into encrypted traffic and potential threats, without hindering device or network performance. The Appliances provide:
- Line-rate Network Performance: sending non-SSL flows to the attached security appliance(s) or cut-through in less than 40 microseconds to minimize any delay for latency sensitive applications, such as Voice over IP (VoIP). The appliance supports decryption of up to 9 Gbps of SSL traffic for all SSL/TLS versions and over 70 cipher suites.
- High Connection Rate/Flow Count: inspecting up to 800,000 concurrent SSL sessions and supporting the teardown and setup of up to 30,000 new sessions per second.
- High Availability: offering integrated fail-to-wire/fail-to-open hardware and configurable link state monitoring and mirroring for guaranteed network availability and network security.
