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Ensuring a Secure and Reliable Network

The Organizing Committee of the World Summit on the Information Society (COSMSI) turned to Stonesoft in order to handle this complex challenge and to give confidence to the remarkable event.

In today´s world, information and communication technologies (ICTs) are at the heart of social development and economic policies. ICTs are preconditions for development and unprecedented opportunities that can help nations to turn the digital gap into a digital asset.

The World Summit on the Information Society (COSMSI) is a response to the need for a harmonious evolution of concepts, policies,  legislation, networks and services in communications.

The collaboration between COSMSI and Stonesoft is a live example of a common project that aims to develop digital communication in a globalized networked world by supporting the establishment of a bridge between various digital communities. It is a crucial milestone towards the creation of an information society based on secure information and communication technologies.

The recently held World Summit on the Information Society was the global summit for countries facing the challenges of the information society. This was the second phase of the World Summit as the first phase was held in Geneva in 2003.  From 16th to 18th of November 2005, the main stakeholders and decision-makers from the private sector, government, civil society, the UN agencies and the media gathered in Tunis.

Major issues on the agenda were to take concrete action to:

• bridge the “digital divide” between countries with access to information and those without, as affordability of access is a critical part of bridging the digital divide
  
• consolidate the information society through partnerships between private and public entities
  
• draft a clear statement of political intent taking all stakeholders´ interest into account
  
• report on the progress of actions started in 2003

The participants took concrete action to bridge the digital gap between countries with access to information & those without,  consolidated the information society through partnerships between private and public entities and  drafted a clear statement of political intent taking all stakeholders' interest into account.

National delegations from 174 countries and participants from more than 800 entities attended the summit. All in all 19400 participants took part in this huge three-day event.

The Challenge

Arranging an event of this magnitude means facing several challenges. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), based in Geneva, Switzerland, was the UN agency, which held the leading role in the organization of the summit.

Stonesoft, an innovative provider of integrated network security and business continuity solutions and main partner of the event, was chosen to offer network security expertise during the summit.

Ensuring a secure and reliable network was of major importance and first priority during the event. There were several challenges in ensuring the network security in a summit of this scope: several different organizations were working together, requiring continuous communication and flexible co-operation between all the parties before and during the event.

• Downtime was not an option, and thus the network security solution had to provide the highest level of availability.
• No false negative events were accepted, all attacks had to be detected by StoneGate IPS.
• A large amount of media publicity was involved in the summit and Stonesoft was publicly announced to be the network security provider. This could attract hackers and crackers and to target specifically towards the StoneGate products.
  
• The participants could use also their own laptops and the Summit offered WLAN connectivity for everyone. Thus, the client machines located inside the Summit network could not be trusted.
  
• There were various applications and network protocols used e.g., for participant registration, physical security and access control, WebCasting of the summit sessions, and Internet access of the participants.

The Solution

In order to overcome the multiple challenges in ensuring the network security, it was crucial to follow main solution principles.

The main solution principle was to simplify the structure of the system as much as possible in order to make it simple and clear. It was important to find a simplified solution to a complex challenge. The servers had to be put in optimal locations and it was also relevant to know the limitations of the environment and set the rules and expectations aligned with them. It was important to know the correct contact persons and to recognize critical components and users. Last minute changes had to be avoided and all the necessary changes to be evaluated with extreme caution before they were implemented.

The summit network had two 155 Mbps Internet links that were connected with StoneGate´s Multi-Link to ensure the high availability and always-on connectivity to and from the Internet. The built-in load-balancing feature of StoneGate Multi-Link technology took care of balancing the traffic between the Internet links. Dynamic load balancing and high availability of the firewalls was achieved through clustering. Multiple StoneGate firewall clusters were used to connect various fixed and wireless network segments together, to ensure secure access between the networks. To guarantee availability, the cluster members were distributed physically in separate machine rooms, each located at opposite sides of the summit area.

StoneGate IPS sensors and an analyzer were monitoring and analyzing the traffic in the internal networks and blocked the malicious connections by co-operating with the firewalls for intrusion protection. Unified and centralized management enabled to handle a huge amount of traffic and to follow real-time status of the network as multiple administrators worked together simultaneously.

“ The reliability and the robustness of the StoneGate Platform impressed me especially because the information system of the SMSI was a very remarkable target of attacks and intrusions. In spite of the complexity of the network architecture approved by the ITU, several independent WLANs and federators, neither breakdown nor stop affected the ongoing operation of the network and information system .”

Mr Tahar Hafaiedh, President of the Computer and Networking Commission of COSMSI

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Compelling Results

Stonesoft managed the overall network security successfully and both ITU and COSMSI were very pleased with the outstanding performance of StoneGate. The co-operation between the several organizations worked seamlessly and the event achieved extremely positive feedback on both local and global level.

During the summit, 400,000 IPS log records generated during the week, over 2,5 millions connections opened to the Internet each day, over 10,000 connections established to the WebCasting server each day, and 200 alerts generated by IPS each day, out of which very few alerts were false positive ones.

By using the real-time monitoring, comprehensive logging, and powerful reporting tool of the StoneGate Management Center, it was possible to manage the huge amount of data and to provide fast responses always when needed. The overall status information was also all the time available through the monitoring functionality of the network layout editor.

“It would have been impossible to monitor, analyze and manage the network without an intelligent management system. StoneGate´s architecture provided centralized management enabling the co-operation between IPS and firewalls possible. The integrated reporting feature produced information very quickly and made it possible to forecast trends of the traffic. This was very important because it gave the possibility to the administrator to manage the network status at once”, says Ilkka Hiidenheimo, CEO and founder at Stonesoft Corp.

“The major concerns of the COSMSI were to bring a good coordination and collaboration during the summit while taking care of excellence and perfection of the network security solutions," says Mr Tahar Hafaiedh, President of the Computer and Networking Commission of COSMSI. Mr Hafaiedh continues, “The impressions which I have of Stonesoft and its StoneGate solution are as follows:

• The flexibility of the StoneGate Platform adapted to the intermittent changes in the needs and was very reliable
• The reliability and the robustness of the StoneGatePlatform impressed me especially because the information system of the SMSI was a very remarkable target of attacks and intrusions. In spite of the complexity of the network architecture approved by the ITU, several independent WLANs and federators, neither breakdown nor stop affected the ongoing operation of the network and information system 
• StoneGate Management Center was a very powerful, user-friendly management tool, which allowed a good comprehension and gave a very clear visibility of the network. A detailed report/ratio was delivered after the course of the top, which indicated a great reliability and power of the Reporting Tool."

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