November 2, 2007; 11:02 AM Armorlogic, the Danish web application firewall provider, announces
free version of Profense™ – an automated web application firewall with
built in http(s) load balancing.
And there is no catch. Free means free for commercial as well as
non-commercial use, without time limitation. Profense™ Base offers the
same filtering, load balancing and compression features as the paid
version Profense™ Professional. The only differences are the added
features and the support options available.
Both versions offer an HTTP & HTTPS Load balancer with session
persistence and a white-list based web application firewall. They
protect the web site by determining allowable requests and inputs and
disallowing everything else. This approach provides protection against
zero day attacks, simply because they are not in the white-list and
thus are disallowed. The access policy is automatically built by
learning from traffic to and from the web site. The resulting policy
describes acceptable use of the web site and includes positive
validation patterns for web application input parameters. Positive
input validation effectively prevent attacks targeting web applications
like SQL injection and Cross-Site Scripting.
Customers looking for features like active/active clustering ("self
load balancing"), automated cluster synchronization and automated push
backup may consider upgrading to the Professional version which is
competitively priced at € 5,000 for a cluster license including the
first year of support.
With the free version is included the Limited support package.
Customers running Profense™ Base with limited support have to download
and re-install Profense™ when an updated version is available. Also the
Limited support package does not include prioritized support.
To get the reasurrance of prioritized incident response and the
convenience of not having to re-install when updates are available
customers can upgrade their support package to get prioritized support
and automated inline updates.
Unlike most competing alternatives Profense™ is a software appliance.
It includes a hardened OS and installs on most standard hardware,
including virtual platforms. A major advantage of the software
appliance model is that it offers lower cost of disaster preparedness
and recovery. If disaster strikes all that is needed to restore
Profense™ is a backup and a piece of general purpose server hardware.
For competitors appliance based solutions a new expensive specialized
piece of hardware have to be procured or kept standby off-site.
The free version of Profense™ enters a market where automated web
application firewalls are priced at €20,000 and up – for one unit. To
ensure uninterrupted availability web application firewalls are
typically run in clusters of two. The price of a Profense™ Base cluster
is the price of the server hardware – less than €2,000 per node. To run
the run the cluster in automatically synchronized active/active mode a
Profense™ Professional license is needed. Including hardware and
support the cost will be less than €10,000.
The flipside of the coin is that Profense™ is not delivered as a
shrink-wrapped appliance ready for deployment. Customers have to
procure a piece of server hardware, download an iso-image, burn a cd
and install the software. With the server hardware ready this process
takes less than 1 hour.
ISO images and software licenses are available from https://www.armorlogic.com.
More information about the free load balancer and web spplication
firewall at https://www.armorlogic.com/profense_profense_base.html.
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About Armorlogic:
Armorlogic ApS is a Danish software development company focused
entirely on web application security. The company is founded in early
2005 by Srebrenko Sehic and Jakob Frydendal Gercke who prior to
founding Armorlogic were both internet security specialists in Big 4
consulting.
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