Garrison Technology HOW SECURE REMOTE BROWSING DELIVERS HIGH SECURITY EVEN FOR MAINSTREAM COMMERCIAL ORGANISATIONS

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1 Garrison Technology HOW SECURE REMOTE BROWSING DELIVERS HIGH SECURITY EVEN FOR MAINSTREAM COMMERCIAL ORGANISATIONS The weak underbelly for most enterprises cybersecurity is the user endpoint. Laptops, desktops and tablets are used to access your most critical information and systems. But they are also used to access Internet services that you know little about websites which even if not designed to be malicious, might have been subverted by a malicious attacker. Traditional controls no longer provide an answer. The attack surface is too large and attackers only need to find one vulnerability. Spearphishing, watering hole attacks and drive-by-downloads lead to real business impacts such as data loss, financial theft, ransomware or sabotage. Is the game over? Must enterprises resign themselves to breaches? Or adopt the restrictive security practices of military and national security organisations? Secure Remote Browsing from Garrison provides the answer. By providing truly secure access even to the most dangerous Internet content, security can be truly proactive about the Internet cyber threat. And by reducing the need for traditional layered controls, this can lead to an overall cost saving. At last, it may be possible to achieve the impossible: improved security without restrictions at a lower cost.

2 How secure remote browsing delivers high security even for mainstream commercial organisations Understanding the Internet cyber threat The Internet is a global space which is only very lightly controlled. Amidst the information and the services that we all rely on are also people and organisations whose interests and objectives are opposed to yours, and who are willing to do you harm to achieve their aims. Of course, those adversaries exist in the physical world too. In the physical world, in a developed country subject to the rule of law, your adversaries might try to break into your buildings in order to steal your information or goods, or to compromise your systems. But they will need to be careful, because if they get caught, they can expect to face the criminal justice system. In the global, connected space of the Internet, your adversaries can operate from jurisdictions where governments have insufficient resources to pursue them or have been bought off. In some cases, the governments themselves may be your adversaries. And the Internet provides them with the ability to operate across multiple territories at the same time in order to play states off against each other and obscure their identities. That means your adversaries can simply keep trying time and time again. They only need to succeed once. It s inherently asymmetric and unfair. 2 Garrison Technology Ltd 2017

3 Targeting the weak underbelly Your business is connected to the Internet in two ways. One: through the services that you provide. The other: through the services that you consume. For security-conscious organisations, it is the latter that presents the weak underbelly. When you provide services over the Internet, you get to choose how those services are architected and delivered. You can define structured interfaces between multiple tiers separating complex presentation logic from business logic with well-defined simple interfaces. You can keep tight control over what presentation logic is used; keep it well patched; turn off unnecessary modules. Of course, it s easy to do it badly there are innumerable websites which are too easy to compromise. But it s also possible to do it well. When your users consume Internet services the situation is quite different. Highly complex logic outside your control, in multiple applications, plugins and extensions. This software running on thousands of machines, each controlled by a user with little understanding or interest in security. Highly complex datatypes and content delivered directly to each of those software elements on each of those machines. SECURE And each of those machines also has access to your most sensitive data and systems. In this landscape of hyper-complexity, even the security controls themselves can present exploitable vulnerabilities. The only control that works reliably is the simplest one: turning things off. 3

4 How secure remote browsing delivers high security even for mainstream commercial organisations Cutting the cord In the highest-security circles the world of military and national security that has been the historic approach. Disconnection from the Internet for classified systems; separate machines for access to risky Internet content. SECURE In the commercial world, that s not really an option. Businesses increasingly rely on cloud-based services for their operations. And in an era of mobility and knowledge-workers, the idea of requiring multiple machines is usually laughable. A different model is required: one that brings the security benefits of disconnection while preserving the business benefits of the cloud. Secure remote browsing technology from Garrison enables this. 4 Garrison Technology Ltd 2017

5 Cutting the cord With secure remote browsing, access to high-risk Internet resources is provided via a sacrificial machine. Internet content is rendered on the sacrificial machine which the user views and controls remotely. If the sacrificial machine is compromised, it has access to nothing sensitive and can do no harm. It can be easily restarted, restoring it to its original uncompromised state. And with the sacrificial machine deployed in the data centre or in the cloud, done right, user experience, workflow and productivity can be maintained. 5

6 How secure remote browsing delivers high security even for mainstream commercial organisations Isn t that just remote desktop? In a way, yes. And indeed, some organisations have deployed secure remote browsing using traditional VDI technologies. But using legacy remote desktop products presents a host of challenges: Cost Poor user experience Residual concerns over security vulnerabilities. Any secure remote browsing technology must allow a secure device to view and control a less secure, sacrificial, machine. But the right solution should also: 1. Provide a high level of confidence that the stream of data showing what the sacrificial machine is doing cannot be used as a path to attack the secure client device 2. Provide a high level of confidence that the communications channel used to control the sacrificial machine cannot be used as a path to attack the secure client device 3. Deliver a great user experience, even for Internet video and increasingly graphical interactive web content. Plus copy and paste safely 4. Be easy to deploy. Reasonable demands on the network and support for all types of devices 5. Offer a clear user interface that intuitively helps users understand when they are interacting with high-risk Internet sites that should not be trusted with sensitive information 6. Be cost-effective. Blocking sites and moving their traffic to secure remote browsing can deliver an overall cost saving. With ultra-high-security and a great user experience at an affordable price, Garrison s technology delivers on all fronts. 6 Garrison Technology Ltd 2017

7 How does Garrison work? The founders of Garrison realised that software-based technology would never achieve their goals for a secure remote browsing solution. The price-performance challenge is simply too great and security vulnerability too high. Instead, the Garrison SAVI Isolation Appliance is a unique hardware appliance engineered from the ground up to deliver security and performance at an affordable cost. At the heart of Garrison is our patented Silicon Assured Video Isolation (Garrison SAVI ) technology. Garrison SAVI technology relies on the use of the ARM devices found in mobile phones and tablet devices. Two ARM devices are used as a pair to create a SAVI Node: The ARM device on the left hand side in the diagram above works like a tablet consuming and rendering Internet content. With on-board hardware graphics acceleration and video decoding, it delivers an excellent price/performance profile The video output from this ARM device which would normally be transmitted to a screen for display is instead transmitted to the camera input of a second ARM device. This device takes the camera input, compresses it using the on-board video compression hardware found in every smartphone and transmits it for display at the user s endpoint In the reverse direction, keyboard and mouse commands are transmitted via Garrison s Hardware Security Enforcement Fabric which ensures that this channel is unidirectional and bandwidthlimited and that an audit copy of every interaction is available for monitoring. 7

8 How secure remote browsing delivers high security even for mainstream commercial organisations The Garrison SAVI security design means that even if the ARM device on the left of the diagram gets compromised, the worst it can do is to show bad pictures to the user. And as soon as the user s session is complete, the device will be fully wiped down at the hardware level to ensure that no malware can persist. The Garrison SAVI Isolation Appliance packs 288 of these SAVI Nodes into a 3U rackable chassis, supporting up to 288 concurrent users each of which will receive a high-quality user experience even for rich media content. Depending on the frequency with which access to risky sites is required, a single appliance can support much larger numbers of endpoints. And for widespread use across a complete enterprise, appliances can be stacked to provide effectively unlimited scalability either on-site, or in a 3rd party data centre to be delivered as a cloud-like service. 8 Garrison Technology Ltd 2017

9 The bigger picture Browsing is only the start. In addition to the Garrison SAVI Isolation Appliance, Garrison supplies the Garrison Transfer Appliance a parallel hardware appliance that ensures that Garrison users can copy and paste risky Internet content via their enterprise clipboards with complete security. The Garrison Transfer Appliance also provides a way for users to print risky web pages to sensitive corporate printers. Many file downloads can be kept in the cloud and viewed using Garrison. But when file downloads truly are required at the corporate desktop, Garrison is designed for easy integration with existing and planned content scanning, filtering and transformation pipelines such as the existing attachment security pipeline. Enterprises have a tactical need for business enablement today enhancing the user experience when users need to visit risk sites that are blocked. And that need will grow, as increased threat levels mean fewer and fewer sites can be trusted. But with Garrison, enterprises have a strategic opportunity too. If users are content to browse with Garrison, a much wider range of web traffic can be moved out of the enterprise. Not only will this improve security it will allow spend on traditional layered security defences to be reduced. Security, usability or cost? With Garrison, there s no need to compromise. 9

10 How secure remote browsing delivers high security even for mainstream commercial organisations For more information please contact Phoenix Datacom Tel: Web: 10 Garrison Technology Ltd 2017 CD v2.3 - October 2017