Sophos Xstream SSL Inspection: Visibility, protection and performance
The new Xstream Architecture in XG Firewall v18 includes an all-new, high-performance SSL Inspection solution that delivers the industry’s best visibility into encrypted traffic flows, support for TLS 1.3 without downgrading, and extreme levels of performance.
With the volume of encrypted traffic now at about 80% and growing steadily, SSL inspection is a top issue for many organizations. And, rightly so.
This volume of encryption is not only creating an enormous blind spot that hackers are leveraging, but it has also pushed most firewalls past their breakpoint. Many organizations are powerless to do much about it and so their firewalls are effectively being rendered obsolete.
XG Firewall’s new Xstream Architecture, however, is designed for the modern encrypted internet.
Extreme visibility into encrypted traffic flows
XG Firewall is unique in providing unprecedented visibility into encrypted traffic flows. As soon as you login, you can see at a glance the volume of encrypted traffic on your network, how much is actively being decrypted and if there are any compatibility issues.
And with just a couple of clicks, you can resolve any potential issues to ensure an outstanding user experience.
An extreme focus on security and support for TLS 1.3 (without downgrading)
Most Firewall and UTM vendors will claim support for TLS 1.3 but they are actually downgrading the encrypted session to TLS 1.2. XG Firewall has been designed to deal with our modern encrypted internet, with full support for TLS 1.3.
TLS 1.3 is the latest standard for good reasons, it resolves important security and performance issues with TLS 1.2. Downgrading creates an opening for attacks and degrades performance.
With TLS 1.3 support quickly increasing amongst major web servers and hosting organizations, no one should even consider a new firewall purchase today without proper support for TLS 1.3.
XG Firewall also offers among the best controls in the industry for handling insecure and legacy cipher suites thanks to comprehensive options as part of new Decryption Profiles that can be used in your TLS inspection rules.
You have full enterprise-grade controls to strike the perfect balance between security, privacy, performance, and compliance for your organization.
Extreme Performance
The new Xstream Architecture in XG Firewall v18 delivers outstanding performance across all firewall functions, including SSL Inspection.
The new packet processing architecture includes an all-new streaming, deep-packet-inspection engine that not only provides high-performance SSL decryption but also hands-off decrypted content for IPS, web protection, AV, and application identification and control all in a single engine.
Utilizing the latest machine learning models, our new threat intelligence also analyzes incoming files with active code in real-time to identify threats that haven’t even been seen before, to keep the latest ransomware payloads and other threats off your network in the first place.
With the new Xstream SSL Inspection in XG Firewall v18, encrypted files can no longer harbour threats that might be going undetected through your network firewall.
Where to learn more
For further insights into the challenges most firewalls have with properly inspecting TLS encrypted traffic, the enormous blind spot this creates, and how hackers are increasingly utilizing encryption to their advantage, read our latest report: Has encryption made your current firewall irrelevant?
If you’re new to XG Firewall, check out all the other great advantages XG Firewall provides when it comes to your network visibility, protection and performance and start an instant online demo.