U. S. cellular barracuda Web application and data security implementation case

Bkjia.com integrated message] U. s. cellular is the eighth largest wireless service provider in the United States. headquartered in Chicago, it operates wireless telephone and data operations services in 25 U.S. states. It has 500 outlets and 1800 sales agents.

The company's portal website provides product information, product support, online services, and other functions for users and their agents. The online services of users and agents must be connected to the data center at the website background, therefore, the security and availability of data center operations are very prominent.

To ensure website security, U. s. cellular first adopted the traditional security solution: for example, using a firewall to protect the network, encrypting all transactions to protect privacy, using password verification to control application interaction, recording access logs, and enhancing auditing; however, U. s. after in-depth research on Web Application Security, cellular's security team found that its traditional security measures could not eliminate website security risks:

1. hacker attacks against large online websites increase and data theft occurs frequently. The new law defines the responsibility for information protection. Once U. s. the cellular website is attacked, and the customer information is leaked. The loss is immeasurable.

2. A large number of security vulnerabilities have been found during the application vulnerability test on the website. If source code security revision protection is adopted, the cost is high. It is estimated that it will exceed 1000000 USD. It may take up to 12-18 months. The most important thing is that the source code cannot be completely repaired.

Therefore, U. S. cellular decided to use a new security device.

Requirements of U. S. cellular

1. New devices must protect applications. The root cause of Web Application Security Threats lies in application code, rather than servers and networks. Therefore, new devices are not more network-layer work devices, you must be able to check Web application traffic and perform in-depth HTTP Detection.

2. ensure the reliability and security of the data center. You must be able to prevent database attacks through Web applications. The device must have redundancy and failover functions.

3. SSL uninstall capability is required to reduce server load

4. User authentication is required to enhance access security.

5. solutions must be easy to manage and use. U. S. cellular does not want new devices to require a large amount of personnel training and complex maintenance time. New devices must be similar to existing data center devices.

Barracuda Web application firewall solution:

Barracuda Network Ltd., the world's leading provider of Application security and delivery solutions, proposed an Application solution centered on Barracuda WEB Application Controllers. On the one hand, it can help U. S. cellular's WEB servers and WEB applications provide comprehensive protection, including:

1) Security Protection against known WEB system and network infrastructure vulnerability attacks;

2) Protection against various malicious attacks;

3) data center security; on the other hand, barracuda WEB application firewall is also responsible for the high availability and efficiency of enterprise network applications, and compresses the TCP pool, cache, and GZIP of the acceleration function) and availability function load balancing, content exchange, health check, etc.) in a single node together to significantly simplify the data center architecture.

The specific solution application is as follows: 

Figure

1. barracuda Web application firewall (WAF) performs In-depth detection of data packets, sets rules based on http methods, parameters, and submitted code, and actively defends against various hacker attacks, including U. s. cellular is particularly concerned with SQL injection, Cookie Theft, directory traversal, and other attacks.

2. Full-system redundant deployment with powerful processing capabilities to ensure reliable operation of data centers.

3. By deploying SSL offload, Server Load balancer, compression, cache, and other functions, the page response time is improved.

4. Proxy authentication makes logon more secure.

5. The system is easy to learn. Its security rules are similar to the concept of network firewall. The GUI provides a physical deployment, initial configuration, and each application takes only one hour.