Juniper Shows Off Its Funk(y) New Security Tools

Odyssey Access Client (OAC) 4.5 and Steel Belted Radius (SBR) 5.4 are strategic components of Juniper's unified access control (UAC) solution, which uses the vendor's Infranet Controllers and blends identity-based policy and end-point intelligence to prevent unauthorized users from connecting to networks.

OAC is 802.1x supplicant software for configuring networks and user connections and limiting connectivity in certain situations. New features of OAC 4.5 include the ability to prevent the assignment of multiple IP addresses as a means of boosting security, said Oliver Tavakoli, vice president of engineering at Juniper and former CTO at Funk Software.

In addition to preventing notebook PCs from being simultaneously connected to wireless and wired networks, OAC 4.5 allows administrators to set up shared devices to automatically issue new credentials for each user, even if the previous user fails to log off, Tavakoli added.

SBR is a Radius/AAA (authentication, authorization, accounting) server for managing user profiles and configuring user policy information. SBR 5.4's expanded configuration options streamline the authentication process and ensure that clients and servers can communicate, he said.

SBR 5.4 provides a straightforward way to manage clients using 802.1x port-based authentication, said Glen Grotendorst, director of Empire Computing, an Ormond Beach, Fla.-based solution provider. 802.1x security prevents unauthorized access to wired and wireless networks and is rapidly gaining favor with enterprise customers, he added.

Michelle Drolet, CEO of Conqwest, a security integrator in Holliston, Mass., also thinks Juniper's acquisition of Funk Software will pay off. "It's going to fill a gap in Juniper's product line," she said.

Juniper is integrating OAC and SBR into the UAC architecture and is developing stand-alone versions of each product, Tavakoli said.

The addition of SBR 5.4 and OAC 4.5 gives Juniper widely supported authentication and policy management tools that have been a de facto standard for years, said Chris Labatt-Simon, president and CEO of D&D Consulting, an Albany, N.Y.-based solution provider.

"While other vendors are releasing 2.0 products, [Juniper] is releasing highly mature, stable, enterprise capable solutions," Labatt-Simon said.

A single server license of SBR Enterprise Edition starts at $4,800; OAC is priced at $39.45 per client for 200 clients. Additional volume discounts are available.