Secure Computing - Secure Firewalls

Secure Firewalls

The company's flagship firewall product is now called McAfee Firewall Enterprise (formerly known as Sidewinder). Over the years, Secure Computing (and its antecedent organizations) has offered the following major lines of firewall products:

• Firewall Enterprise (Sidewinder) – historically based on SecureOS, the company's derivative of BSDi (previously BSD/OS), but now based on FreeBSD.
• Secure Firewall Reporter
• Secure Firewall CommandCenter
• CyberGuard
  • Secure SnapGear – embedded system based on μClinux
  • Classic – built on UnixWare
  • TSP (Total Stream Protection) – built on Linux
• Borderware – sold off, as noted previously
• SecureZone – discontinued
• Firewall for NT – discontinued
• Gauntlet – built on Solaris, nearly phased out

The Sidewinder firewall incorporated technical features of the high-assurance LOCK system, including Type enforcement, a technology later applied in SELinux. However, interaction between Secure Computing and the open source community has been spotty due to the company's ownership of patents related to Type enforcement. The Sidewinder never really tried to achieve an A1 TCSEC rating, but it did earn an EAL-4+ Common Criteria rating.

Along with Sidewinder, Gauntlet had been one of the earliest application layer firewalls; both had developed a large customer base in the United States Department of Defense. Gauntlet was originally developed by Trusted Information Systems (TIS) as a commercial version of the TIS Firewall Toolkit, an early open source firewall package developed under a DARPA contract.