Press

NSS Labs Publishes Data Center Intrusion Prevention System Test

July 6, 2016

Overall Security Effectiveness ranged from 23.2% to 99.9%.

AUSTIN, Texas – July 6, 2016 NSS Labs, the world’s leading information security research and advisory company, today released its Data Center Intrusion Prevention System (DCIPS) Security Value Map™ (SVM) and Comparative Report™ series, evaluating the six leading DCIPS solutions for security effectiveness, performance, and total cost of ownership (TCO).

Test highlights include:

  • 5 of 6 products achieved a Recommended rating; 1 product received a Caution rating.
  • Overall Security Effectiveness ranged from 23.2% to 99.9%.
  • Four of six products received a lower tested throughput rating than their stated performance claims. However, one vendor achieved approximately 99% higher performance than claimed.
  • Average Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) per protected megabit per second was US$38, with individual vendor TCO ranging from US$7 to US$138.

This is the first year NSS conducted research into ‘street prices’, capturing vendor discounts in competitive bid situations. Solution discounts ranged from 6% to 60%, while hardware-only discounts ranged from 6% to 65%.

Performance, security, and stability are extremely important for any device in the datacenter. From a business perspective, a compromise in a data center can lead to substantial monetary and intellectual property losses. A DCIPS is designed to be highly tunable to ensure high security, performance and availability are achieved. A DCIPS failure can severely impact the performance and security of a datacenter.

The Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) TippingPoint 7500NX v3.7.2.4252 received a Caution rating due to the device failing a state management test when the device load exceeded 10% capacity. In addition, it failed to protect against an IP Fragmentation / MSRPC Fragmentation evasion.

DCIPS testing began on March 1, 2016, and Trend Micro finalized the acquisition of TippingPoint from HPE on March 8, 2016. As the new owner of TippingPoint, Trend Micro was notified of the failures and quickly took action to resolve the issues. NSS Labs retested a new version of the product, TOS v3.8.3.4494, which resolves the security issues found in the HPE version of the product.

“Trend Micro moved swiftly to resolve this major issue, with enough time for us to add a footnote in our group test before publication”, said Vikram Phatak, CEO of NSS Labs. “While the new version of the product missed the deadline to be in our Security Value Map, we are calling out their new product to inform enterprises of this security fix,” added Phatak.

The following products were included in the 2016 DCIPS Group Test:

  • Fortinet FortiGate 3000D v5.4.0, build 7184
  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise TippingPoint 7500NX v3.7.2.4252
  • IBM Security Network Protection XGS 7100 v5.3.2.1
  • Intel Security McAfee Network Security Platform NS9100 v8.2.5.120
  • Juniper Networks SRX5400 v12.3X48-D18
  • Palo Alto Networks PA-7050 v7.0.4

The current DCIPS market is estimated by NSS Labs to be at US$450 million and is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 15% over the forecast period (2015 through 2020).

The DCIPS Security Value Map™ can be downloaded for free from the NSS Labs website. DCIPS individual test reports and comparative reports can be found in the library.