Announcements

Zurich, November 29, 2011 - Since April this year, the Airlock development team at Ergon has been working intensively on its next big release - Airlock 4.2.4. To date more than one hundred new features, refinements, improvements and bug fixes have been implemented. An adjustment to their project approach has enabled Airlock to produce better software even faster. Quality assurance is enhanced by systematic peer reviews for both designs and code. All changes to the previous version are tested and signed off within days after their first implementation, after which they are put to the ‘real-world test’ in Airlock’s own installations.

Airlock 4.2.4 is now available, both as an update and as a full installation version on our Techzone. The most important new features are:

Load balancing
Airlock’s back-end load balancing capabilities have been substantially improved and now support asymmetric load distribution over several servers, as well as “spare” servers to build fail-over systems. In addition to the existing in-band health checks, an Airlock administrator can now also configure out-of-band checks by scheduling periodic calls to a pre-defined Web page, and using the answers to evaluate a server’s state. Monitoring load on a server due to be taken down for maintenance has been simplified (graceful shutdown). Finally, the user interface in this area has been updated to highlight the connection between back-end hosts within the same load-balancing group.

Request streaming
Requests can now be handled as streams, for immediate pass-through to the target back-end host, without being stored on Airlock first. This enables uploading of large files (e.g. movies or imaging data) as well as the protocol “RPC over HTTP(S)” required for Microsoft’s “Outlook Anywhere”.

Mapping templates
New templates for Microsoft Exchange 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010 have been created and integrated in Airlock.

Revised user interface
Airlock’s Configuration Center now uses the Web browser’s complete screen width. The reverse proxy page was simplified by splitting it into an overview page and separate detail views for mappings, virtual hosts and back-end systems. The user friendliness of these pages has also been improved.

Support for unblu
Utilising Airlock, the co-browsing solution unblu (http://www.unblu.com/) can now easily be integrated into a client's existing infrastructure.

For more detailed information, please contact: joerg.ewald(at)ergon.ch.

Airlock protects websites from latest Apache vulnerability

Zurich, August 31, 2011 - Ergon has released update 4.2.3.3 for the Airlock Web application firewall, as a measure against a security vulnerability discovered in Apache, the world’s leading Web server. Apache-based Web applications that are accessed through Airlock are therefore immediately protected from the published denial-of-service attacks, eliminating the need to install a new version of Apache.

Airlock 4.2.3.3 can be downloaded directly from the Airlock Techzone where an article describing the vulnerability in more detail can also be found.

Airlock and IPv6

Zurich, August, 2011 - The Internet, with all its services including e-mail and access to a wealth of information and resources via the World Wide Web, is based on the Internet Protocol, or IP. IP’s version 4 has slowly reached its limit, especially with regard to the number of potential participants in the global network. Once introduced, IP version 6, aka IPv6, will provide much needed relief, however the introduction of this new, much more powerful version has been sluggish, due to a variety of reasons. An important one is the large effort and high cost faced by service providers wanting to offer their applications through IPv6 as well. To achieve this, they are faced with having to basically re-build their entire internal network infrastructure.

An Airlock solution
An alternative to a complete re-build is a so-called reverse proxy, as it is at the center of Airlock’s architecture. By extending its configuration, it can receive requests both via IPv4 and IPv6. Communication with the application servers protected by Airlock would still be through classic IPv4 – internal IP addresses would not be affected. The applications’ responses will be sent to the browsers using the original protocol.

The Airlock engineering team accomplished the changes required to achieve the above with a prototype that makes IPv4 application servers accessible via IPv6. The next step is to test this new technology outside of the Airlock labs – preferably in collaboration with an existing Airlock customer.

For additional information on Airlock and IPv6, please contact Jörg Ewald, Head of Product Management Web Application Security: joerg.ewald(at)ergon.ch.

Four module updates ready for download

Zurich, June, 2011 - Development work for Airlock, Ergon’s Web application firewall, is running at full speed with version 4.2.4 scheduled for release in November. Airlock’s add-on modules are constantly reviewed, improved and adapted in response to customer requirements. Work on four module updates has recently been completed. These new releases are detailed below and can be downloaded from the Airlock Techzone:

Authentication Service 2.5.6
The quickest way to achieve upstream authentication with Airlock is via Airlock’s Authentication Service. There, most authentication scenarios, from simple to very complex, can be created through simple configuration. An SDK is available for customer specific extensions. Version 2.5.6 now gives access to extended fields in certificates and had several smaller bugs and blemishes corrected.

Application Portal 2.0
The Airlock Application Portal offers Airlock administrators a quick and extremely flexible way to provide their users with a single page that lists all applications protected by Airlock. This page is automatically generated, and its look and feel can be modified. The Application Portal offers an ideal entry point to systems with multiple applications. In version 2.0, applications can now be grouped by topic. Administrators can pick one of two pre-defined themes as a starting point for their own, customised design. Additionally, a number of nuisances in the previous version have been removed.

Secure Session Transfer 1.4.1
The Airlock Secure Session Transfer is crucial for seamless integration of Microsoft’s SharePoint with Airlock: With it, users’ session information is transferred from the Web browser to Microsoft Word when opening a document. From then on all interaction between Word and the SharePoint server will work without the user having to perform another login. Version 1.4.1 is a bug-fix release with no additional functionality added.

ICAP SDK 1.1
The ICAP SDK is a tool for software developers who want to implement additional, application specific filters. These filters will then be connected to Airlock through the standard protocol ICAP. Version 1.1 is based on a new, extended API, and includes a testing framework as well as fixes to a number of bugs.

For additional information regarding Airlock and the Airlock add-on modules, contact your partner or get in touch with Ergon's Airlock team under contact.