Security Now Blog: Addressing Today's Information Security Issues

All-in-One Security Appliances Concentrate Vulnerabilities into One Box

Monday, July 28th, 2008

The more complicated something is, the more likely mistakes were made in its making. Mistakes facilitate security breaches. All-in-one security appliances consist of millions and millions of lines of software code. They are extremely complex. A software mistake in just one of the applications (anti-virus, router, firewall, anti-spam, URL filtering, network intrusion prevention, VPN, etc.) or functions of an all-in-one security appliance can compromise all of the other applications. There are examples in the NIST National Vulnerability Database of vulnerabilities in one application that would compromise the others.

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