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Three Firewalls Flunk Stability Tests, NSS Labs Reports: Page 2 of 2

"It's basic establishing communication, down at the TCP layer; it's not the type of thing that gets logged by ISP," says Moy. "It's the type of thing for an organization to detect." The issue is well documented, he says, and attack code is available with Metasploit.

Since being notified of the issue, Juniper, Palo Alto and SonicWall have provided remediation steps available free to registered users on the NSS Labs site. NSS is working with Cisco on a fix, and Fortinet says it will have a fix for later release, according to the report.

The six firewalls all passed other security tests, including configuring basic and complex policies; static and dynamic network address translation (NAT); SYN flood protection and detecting; and IP address spoofing.

The report also rated the firewall appliances for three-year total cost of ownership (TCO) based on price per protected megabit per second, the cost of installation and upkeep, and throughput figures (based upon the average of three traffic types: 21KByte HTTP response traffic, a mix of perimeter traffic common in enterprises and a mix of internal "core" traffic common in enterprises). Palo Alto had the lowest TCO ($10 per megabit per second) and SonicWall the highest ($39 per megabit per second).

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