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Sophos Endpoint Updates over https

faygate

For the past 3 or 4 years we have posed the question to Sophos as to why we cannot update our clients out in the field using a web CID over https. So far this has failed to materialise, which I found bizarre for a company that deals with security. We are a large University and to ensure we our students and staff are protected from viruses and malware, they are allowed to install Sophos on their computers. Now as we like to ensure that we adhere to our licence our users must update Sophos using their University credentials.

As our University credentials are being used to grant access to more and more sensitive systems, this is becoming a real security issue and we are not happy about this credentials being passed over effectively in plain text! Of course we'd have the overhead of the encryption on our webservers, but I'm happy to take that hit and the servers can handle it.

Does anyway else have this requirement for updates via https? I can't believe we are the only ones.

My understanding is that this is now being discussed as a feature request, but it would be good to have some more people on board. Please post your comments below.

Regards, Richard

:226


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    Some remarks to yesterday's sparse answer:

    In the first place it's Sophos' problem. SUM too, as far is I know, is using http not https. And article 12354 tells you how to configure clients to update directly from Sophos using your license credentials. Sophos must be aware of the security implication - guess they monitor the downloads and can at least detect when a SUM is downloading from a location not related to the customer associated with the credentials.

    As for clients updating via http: We configured static download users to download from our webserver and I have been (inofficially) told that this is understandable and ok given the unavailability of a secure connection - under the assumption that we monitor for excessive download activity. I conjecture the following reasoning: An "unauthorized" client downloading from a customer's site will not incur additional costs for Sophos. Since Sophos does not sell it's solutions to "private end users" there is no business lost (well, perhaps for competitors but ...). A security product is different from an office suite for example - you don't need it for exchanging content (in fact it might prevent it :smileywink:) and you can get quite good ones for free. Isn't it a commendation if someone wants just Sophos and nothing else?

    Nevertheless we'd like to stand on firmer ground here.

    Christian

    :247
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  • 0

    Some remarks to yesterday's sparse answer:

    In the first place it's Sophos' problem. SUM too, as far is I know, is using http not https. And article 12354 tells you how to configure clients to update directly from Sophos using your license credentials. Sophos must be aware of the security implication - guess they monitor the downloads and can at least detect when a SUM is downloading from a location not related to the customer associated with the credentials.

    As for clients updating via http: We configured static download users to download from our webserver and I have been (inofficially) told that this is understandable and ok given the unavailability of a secure connection - under the assumption that we monitor for excessive download activity. I conjecture the following reasoning: An "unauthorized" client downloading from a customer's site will not incur additional costs for Sophos. Since Sophos does not sell it's solutions to "private end users" there is no business lost (well, perhaps for competitors but ...). A security product is different from an office suite for example - you don't need it for exchanging content (in fact it might prevent it :smileywink:) and you can get quite good ones for free. Isn't it a commendation if someone wants just Sophos and nothing else?

    Nevertheless we'd like to stand on firmer ground here.

    Christian

    :247
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