For most organizations it is still new that they can talk about cybersecurity with VMware. VMware’s intrinsic security vision is something we have seen the first time at VMworld 2019, and since then it has become more a strategy than a vision.

VMware is not new to enterprise security and it didn’t start with Workspace ONE nor with NSX. Security was already part of their DNA since it was possible for the first time that two virtual machines can share a physical host and have isolated compute resources assigned.

Another example of (intrinsic) security came with vSAN and the encryption of data at rest, then followed by unified endpoint management and identity/access management with Workspace ONE. But wait!

It was August 2013 when Pat Gelsinger introduced NSX as the platform for network virtualization, which included the distributed firewall capability already. The internal firewall is built into the VMware hypervisor since almost 8 years now, wow!

NSX Service-Defined Firewall

I had no customer so far, who wasn’t talking about achieving zero trust security with micro-segmentation to prevent lateral (east-west) movement. Zero trust is one approach to improve data center defenses with the inspection of every traffic flow within the data center. The idea is to divide the data center infrastructure into smaller security zones and that the traffic between the zones is inspected based on the organization’s defined policies.

Micro-segmentation puts a firewall to each virtual machine or workload, allowing us to protect all east-west communication.

So, deploy micro-segmentation and the problem is solved, right? Not quite. While the concept of micro-segmentation has been around for a while, organizations still face barriers when trying to apply it in practice.

Let’s have a look at some of the barriers to micro-segmentation and why this solution alone is not enough (anymore) to achieve zero trust:

• Policy discovery challenges – Identifying the right micro-segments and configuring the proper security policies is an extremely daunting task, especially in a dynamic data center environment.
• Limited-access controls – Basing micro-segmentation solely on L4 attributes (e.g., IP addresses and ports) is not enough. The ephemeral nature of applications and flows requires more than that.
• Reliance on agents – Some micro-segmentation implementations require the installation of extra software agents on each virtual machine (VM), causing complexity and introducing vulnerability.
• Lack of threat detection and prevention – Threats often masquerade as normal-looking traffic. Settling for basic traffic blocking rules isn’t enough.

What does that tell us? Understanding the current applications’ topology and communication flows between their sub-services and -components is not easy. And with applications, which become less monolithic but very dynamic and distributed across multiple clouds, it becomes almost impossible, right?

NSX Intelligence is a home-grown solution that automates policy discovery, understands the communication between services and can construct apps and flows maps (topologies).

Can we assume that traffic from A to B over HTTPS is safe per se with micro-segmentation? Nope.

If we want to enhance traffic analysis capabilities and have a deeper look into traffic, the L7 (application layer) capabilities for micro-segmentation can be used.

Firewall rules cannot consume application IDs. A context-aware firewall identifies applications and enforces a micro-segmentation for east-west traffic, independent of the port that the application uses.

Other use case: For virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI), you could use VMware NSX’s ability to provide Active Directory identity-based firewall (IDFW) rules.

Okay. We have a topology now and can create context-aware service-defined firewall rules. How can we differentiate between good or bad traffic? How can we detect network anomalies?

Today’s attacks are becoming more sophisticated and hackers use masquerading techniques to embed threats within normal-looking traffic flows. Micro-segmentation alone will not intercept hidden threats, it only identifies traffic flows that should be allowed or blocked.

It’s time to talk about advanced inspection capabilities.

NSX Distributed IDS/IPS

In general, for a firewall to inspect traffic, the traffic has to pass through it. In a virtual world this means we would redirect traffic from the VM’s to the firewalls and back. A practice called hair-pinning:

That results in additional traffic and unnecessary latency. NSX has a distributed architecture, there is no centralized appliance that limits security capacity and network traffic doesn’t need to be hair-pinned to a network security stack for traffic inspection. Everything done with physical appliance can now be done in software (see coloring).

The term intrinsic security always means that security is built into the infrastructure. The micro-segmentation capabilities including NSX Intelligence come without an agent – no reliance on agents!

The VMware NSX Distributed IDS/IPS functionality adds additional traffic inspection capabilities to the service-defined firewall and follows the same intrinsic security principles.

Note: These regular-expression IDS/IPS engines detect traffic patterns and are programmed to look for malicious traffic patterns.

NSX Advanced Threat Prevention (ATP)

At VMworld 2020 VMware announced NSX Advanced Threat Protection, that brings technology from their Lastline acquisition to the NSX service-defined firewall.

In my understanding, Lastline’s core product was a malware sandbox that can go deeper (than other sandboxes from other vendors) by using a full-system emulation to look at every instruction the malware executes.

The Lastline system uses machine learning that recognizes essential elements of an attack, unlike the narrow signature-based systems that miss the many variants an attacker may use. The Lastline approach is not just anomaly detection – anomaly detection treats every outlier as bad and results in many false positives. Lastline leverages the deep understanding of malicious behavior to flag clearly bad activities such as East-West movement, command and control activity, and data exfiltration.

This brings us to the powerful combination of the existing VMware capabilities with recently integrated Lastline feature set:

NSX Network Detection and Response

Network Detection and Response (NDR) is a category of security solutions that complement EDR (we talk about Endpoint Detection and Response later) tools.

Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), NSX NDR maps and defends against MITRE ATT&CK techniques with the current capabilities:

NSX NDR protects the network, cloud and hybrid cloud traffic, and provides a cloud-based and on-prem architecture that enables sensors to gain comprehensive visibility into traffic that crosses the network perimeter (north/south), as well as traffic that moves laterally inside the perimeter (east/west).

NSX NDR uses a combination of four complementary technologies to detect and analyze advanced threats:

Behavior-based Network Traffic Analysis (NTA)

Network Traffic Analysis tools are all about detecting anomalies within the network (on-prem and public cloud) and use AI to create models of normal network activity and then alert on anomalies.

The challenge today is that not all anomalies are malicious. With Lastline’s NTA, VMware can now pick up threat behaviors and correlate these to network anomalies and vice versa. Because of this, according to VMware, they have the industry’s most accurate threat detection with minimal false positives.

Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (IDPS)

The NSX Advanced Threat Protection bundle includes IDS/IPS, which is integrated into NSX. The NSX Distributed IDS/IPS benefits from the unique application context from the hypervisor and network virtualization layers to make threat detection more accurate, efficient and dynamic.

The key capabilities of NSX Distributed IDS/IPS include:

• Distributed analysis
• Curated, context-based signature distribution
• Application context-driven threat detection
• Policy and state mobility
• Automated policy lifecycle management

Use cases for NSX Distributed IDS/IPS include:

• Easily achieving regulatory compliance
• Virtualizing security zones
• Replacing discrete appliances
• Virtual patching vulnerabilities

NSX Advanced Threat Analyzer (Sandbox)

Included with NSX Advanced Threat Prevention, Advanced Threat Analyzer provides complete malware analysis and enables accurate detection and prevention of advanced threats. It deconstructs every behavior engineered into a file or URL, and sees all instructions that a program executes, all memory content, and all operating system activity.

Other malware detection technologies, such as traditional sandboxes, only have visibility down to the operating system level. They can inspect content and identify potentially malicious code, but they can’t interact with malware like NSX Advanced Threat Analyzer can. As a result, they have significantly lower detection rates and higher false positives, in addition to being easily identified and evaded by advanced malware. (Advanced threats evade other sandboxing technologies by recognizing the sandbox environment or using kernel-level exploits.)

VMware Threat Analysis Unit (TAU)

With the Lastline acquisition VMware could further increase the capabilities provided by the VMware Carbon Black Threat Analysis Unit (TAU) with network-centric research and behavioral analysis.

The VMware Threat Analysis Unit automatically shares the malware characteristics, behaviors and associated IoCs (Indicator of Compromises) of every malicious object curated and analyzed by VMware with all VMware customers and partners.

NSX Advanced Threat Analyzer continuously updates the VMware TAU in real time with intelligence from partner and customer environments around the world.

NSX Security Packages – How to get NSX ATP

According to the knowledge base article Product Offerings for VMware NSX Security 3.1.x (81231), the new NSX Security editions became available in October 2020:

• NSX Firewall for Baremetal Hosts. For organizations needing an agent-based network segmentation solution.
• NSX Firewall. For organizations with one or more sites (optionally including public cloud endpoints) that primarily need advanced security services, select advanced networking capabilities, and traffic flow visibility and security operations with NSX Intelligence.
• NSX Firewall with Advanced Threat Protection. For organizations that need NSX Firewall capabilities as well as advanced threat prevention capabilities, such as IDS/IPS, threat analysis, and network detection and response.

Use Case with Network Virtualization

If you are a customer with a NSX Data Center Advanced or Enterprise+ license, who uses NSX for network virtualization only today, you just need the “NSX ATP add-on” for NSX Data Center Advanced or Enterprise+.

Note: The ATP add-on requires NSX-T 3.1 and above.

Use Case without Network Virtualization (no NSX Data Center)

If you have no need for network virtualization for now, you have the following options:

1. If you look for base firewall features, you can get started with the NSX Firewall license.
2. Should you look for base firewall features plus advanced threat protection, then start with NSX Firewall with Advanced Threat Protection.
3. From here you still can down the network virtualization path and get the NSX Data Center Enterprise+ add-on for ATP

Use Case for VCF Customers

VCF customers have the option to start with the NSX ATP add-on for NSX NDC Adv/Ent+ as well.

If you are looking for more even security, want NSX Advanced Load Balancer (GSLB, WAF) and/or Carbon Black Cloud Workload Protection (NGAV, EDR, Audit & Remediation) as well, then you have to get the “network and app security” or “advanced security” add-on.

Carbon Black Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)

Before the Carbon Black acquisition, VMware already had strong technology, but was not seen or known as cybersecurity vendor. And it was really this acquisition that made the whole industry understand that VMware had to be taken seriously now as a security vendor.

So, what is EDR according to Wikipedia?

“Endpoint detection and response technology is used to protect endpoints, which are computer hardware devices, from threat. Creators of the EDR technology-based platforms deploy tools to gather data from endpoint devices, and then analyze the data to reveal potential cyber threats and issues. It is a protection against hacking attempts and theft of user data. The software is installed on the end-user device and it is continually monitored. The data is stored in a centralized database. In an incident when a threat is found, the end-user is immediately prompted with preventive list of actions.”

EDR is essential since local activities on machines that may be malicious are not visible on the network. VMware Carbon Black EDR is an incident response and threat hunting solution designed for security operations centers (SOCs) and incident response (IR) teams. Enterprise EDR is delivered through the VMware Carbon Black Cloud, an endpoint protection platform that consolidates security in the cloud using a single agent, console and dataset.

The Lastline acquisition, which came after Carbon Black, was just another brilliant move from VMware!

XDR – VMware Security brings together EDR and NDR

Again, while EDR protects endpoints, NDR protects the network, so that an organization’s entire IT infrastructure is secured. EDR gives security professionals visibility into endpoints that might be compromised, but this isn’t enough when an attack has moved across the network and into other systems by the time the security team is aware of it.

This is where XDR comes in. VMware rolled out its Extended Detection and Response (XDR) strategy at VMworld 2020. By the way, it was in 2020 when Gartner named XDR as one of the top nine cybersecurity trends.

By providing a holistic view of activity across the system that avoids visibility gaps, XDR allows security teams to understand where a threat comes from and how it’s spreading across the environment – in order to eliminate it. In other words, XDR offers greater analysis and correlation capabilities and a holistic point of view.

VMware’s XDR platform is the Carbon Black Cloud. Carbon Black Cloud’s evolution into an XDR platform includes product integrations with existing VMware products like Workspace ONE, vSphere and the NSX service-defined firewall, as well as third-party partner platforms.

At the Carbon Black Connect 2020 event, VMware announced launched their Next-Gen SOC Alliance that features integrations with the VMware Carbon Black Cloud to deliver key XDR capabilities and context into Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) technologies.

We’re in an epic war against cybercrime. We know the asymmetric nature of this war – you will not win by trying to staff your SOC with more analysts. Nor can the battle be won by deploying an individual technology focused on only one part of your IT infrastructure. EDR and NDR along with your SIEM form the winning combination you need to win the war.

Conclusion

The Carbon Black acquisition gave VMware a strong cybersecurity foundation to build on. The recent acquisition of Lastline VMware added sandboxing and network traffic analysis capabilities to their internal firewall, which is provided by NSX.

I don’t think it’s about “can VMware become a leading cybersecurity vendor” anymore. VMware has the most advanced internal firewall and is already becoming a leading cybersecurity vendor. The recent Global InfoSec award just confirms this statement:

• Most Innovative in Endpoint Security” for VMware Carbon Black Cloud
• “Market Leader in Firewall” for VMware NSX Service-defined Firewall

If you want to learn and see more, this YouTube video with Stijn Vanveerdeghem, Sr. Technical Product Manager and Chad Skipper, Global Security Technologist, is a good start.

Thanks for reading! 🙂