Water Resources Discipline ITAC Activities

The NetContinuum NC-1000 Web Security Gateway is a state of the art web application firewall product. It utilizes a proprietary processor called the Continuum Security Processor (CSP) to implement a sophisticated HTTP proxy that intelligently learns the legitimate traffic of a web application. The NC-1000 is based on a positive security model designed to enforce legitimate application behavior and block both known and zero-day attacks. The NC-1000’s positive model enforcement is accomplished by performing bidirectional deep-inspection of both requests and responses. It compares inbound requests from clients against a stored profile of legitimate URLs and parameters which it learned by examining HTML content from the application. The NC-1000 can also enforce administrator defined restrictions on keywords and metacharacters that are contained in request URLs, headers and parameters. By combining these primary methods with other attack-prevention techniques contained in the NC-1000, the product is able to effectively protect against all 21 classes of web-application focused exploits (over 4000 specific attacks have been identified which fit into these 21 classes) without the need for specific signatures designed to thwart individual exploits.

Bob Sowders informed me they are working on Phase 2 of the Enterprise FTP. See the most recent update. Please let me know if you think it would be beneficial for Bob to update us on Phase 2 as well as NetContinumm, or if you want to keep his update to netcontinumm only. See his comments below:

Phase two mainly involves a fail over ftp site to provide high availability as well as redundancy. The short comings of the old system have been identified and are being addressed during the fielding of the second site. Increased capacity for data and network were the identified problems, so drive space is being increased to 1.5 terabyte and a second system is being brought online. We've found that as more people migrate to our system, the more people want to. We never intended to handle the work load of the bureaus large ftp sites but they have all been asking for a piece of the pie due to the, increased security and decreased costs to field units, where budget concerns are raging. The project proposal and peer review has been done and quotes for hardware have been acquired.

However there are still fundamental problems that need to be addressed, so the acquisition of phase two will be incorporated into a phase three where a system much like NatWeb, (but without the cost), will be installed. This final phase will allow account holders to publish data via AFS from their desktops to their own virtual ftp sever registered in their name. The basic rules for accountability for publishing of public data will be observed and the users will benefit from ease of use.

Terri "TJ" Moore
Western Region Computer Specialist
U.S. Geological Survey, Water Discipline
3020 State University Drive, East, Suite 3005
Sacramento CA 95819
Ph: 916-278-9553, Fax: 916-278-9556
Mobile: 916-869-0100
email: tejmoore@usgs.gov