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Alcatel-Lucent Plans Laptop Security for GSM World

Posted on: Friday, 25 January 2008, 06:00 CST

Alcatel-Lucent will launch a version of its Laptop Guardian security offering for operators in the GSM community at next month's Mobile World Congress.

The telecoms and network equipment vendor unveiled the CDMA world version of the product, full name OmniAccess 3500 Nonstop Laptop Guardian, last May, and the event in Barcelona, Spain in February is the logical venue for a launch to the much wider GSM audience.

There are currently about 2.6 billion GSM subscribers, of whom at the end of last year 177 million were on the 3G networks for which the Alcatel-Lucent product is designed, whereas the total CDMA world had some 400 million subscribers on cdma2000 1x RTT or EV-DO networks, the 3G flavors of that radio access technology.

The product is designed to be delivered by mobile operators to their enterprise customers, and at the launch of the CDMA version, Alcatel-Lucent announced that it would be offered by Sprint, Verizon Wireless, and Alltel in the US. This also means it can be subsidized by the operator and bundled into an overall service agreement with the corporate customer.

It consists of a software client communicating back to a server sitting on the corporate network or hosted by the service provider in its data center. The server enables the customer's IT department to protect and control the data on the laptop.

"Since it has an independent power supply, it gives the IT department visibility of what's on the laptop, regardless of whether it's on or off," said Michel Emelianoff, VP of Alcatel-Lucent's enterprise security business unit. "If the laptop is stolen, for instance, they can remotely kill the data on it."

The laptop product is part of a broader portfolio of security offerings the Paris-based group has been putting together over the last year, having created Emelianoff's business unit in mid-year for this purpose.

Emelianoff said the rationale for this move was twofold. "First, there was the evolution of our enterprise customers' requirements, as they started doing communications beyond 802.1x and so needed more network access control," he said. "Second, there was the fact that we had both existing products, and a lot of assets developed within Bell Labs that could be productized."

He said security offerings are being developed in three areas. "First there is network security, with pre- and post-admission control, including authentication, host integrity checking, role-based access, quarantining and behavioral anomaly checking, the idea being to offer modules to go in our switches or overlay capabilities," he said.

In this context, there are a couple of OEM agreements in place for specific modules. With ConSentry, for instance, Alcatel-Lucent has a deal whereby the security switch vendor provides a module for role-based access, while another NAC developer, InfoExpress, is the source of the host integrity checking module.

"The second area is mobility, which is where we're offering the Laptop Guardian products," he said. "The third is application security, where we've just launched another product based on Bell Labs research, namely the OmniAccess 8550 Web Services Gateway."

Raluca Dragnea, general manager of the web services product group at Alcatel-Lucent, described that product, which was launched in mid-December, as "a network appliance to secure automated business processes as part of a company-wide compliance infrastructure." She said this entails inspecting XML and SSL traffic, with hardware-based acceleration for both, revealing that the company is using Tarari silicon for the XML and "more commodity silicon for SSL."

There are a number of companies moving into the XML security offering, with a lot of smaller start-ups having been snapped up by larger players over the last couple of years. IBM bought DataPower, Intel purchased Sarvega, and Cisco acquired Reactivity, for instance.

Dragnea said a big differentiator for the Alcatel-Lucent product is its ability to carry out stateful policy enforcement. "The 8550 can provide a user-centric audit trail, keeping the user ID and context of each session on the device, as well as enforcing rules in real time," she said. "For instance, if a hospital says a doctor can access up to 100 patient records an hour, it can determine at run time that a given doctor is trying to exceed that limit and terminate the session."

The appliance is sold in three sizes based on number of concurrent sessions supported. A paired node for 100 concurrent sessions has a list price of $125,000.

Source: Datamonitor

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