SEATTLE, WA – June 6, 2011 – ExtraHop Networks, a leading provider of network-based application performance management (APM) solutions, today announced support for decryption and analysis of 2048-bit secure sockets layer (SSL)-encrypted application data. The new functionality eliminates the growing blind spot in organizations’ security and application monitoring capabilities caused by the increased use of SSL encryption. Insight into this encrypted data is particularly important as the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently advised that SSL certificates use 2048-bit RSA keys. However, few APM solutions are scalable and powerful enough to perform real-time SSL decryption without degrading overall network performance. With the ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system’s hardware-driven 10Gbps analysis capabilities, organizations have the processing power necessary to decrypt and analyze SSL traffic for common cipher suites at the scale and speed required by today’s enterprise networks.

More encrypted data and stronger encryption keys make software-driven SSL decryption increasingly untenable due to the significant drain in processing resources they require. In fact, according to the seventh edition of Palo Alto Networks’ Application Usage and Risk Report, more than 40 percent of businesses’ applications now are encrypted by SSL, making the transaction data for a substantial portion of applications invisible to network and application performance monitoring tools. Traditional software-driven SSL decryption cannot keep up with this growing workload. The ExtraHop system is different, using advances in hardware to decrypt and analyze SSL-protected data at speeds of up to 10Gbps.

With this latest update, the ExtraHop system supports real-time decryption and analysis of SSL traffic, including SSLv3; TLS 1.0; SSLv2 handshakes; RSA key exchanges; and RC4, AES, and 3DES symmetric ciphers. The system also supports SSL envelope analysis to determine which SSL certificates are being used, making it easy for organizations to determine if their SSL certificates are up to date according to the latest NIST recommendations. Private certificate keys used to decipher the SSL traffic are kept safe using internal encryption to ensure that the key is not transferred to other systems on an organization’s network.

“If organizations can’t see their network traffic data, they can’t monitor the health of their applications. And with increased use of SSL encryption, gaining visibility into the data needed to ensure that business-critical transactions do not fail is harder than ever,” said Jesse Rothstein, CEO and co-founder of ExtraHop Networks. “With this latest functionality, organizations can continue to use passive monitoring solutions in the most secure environments. Maintaining visibility into application transaction data is crucial for organizations wanting to keep their complex enterprise networks and application environments running smoothly.”

The ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system is a real-time, passive network appliance that monitors and analyzes every business-critical transaction from L2 to L7 across network, web, database, and storage tiers, spanning physical and virtual environments. The ExtraHop system combines the troubleshooting capabilities of Network Performance Managers with the superior application-level visibility of User Experience Monitors to perform sophisticated network-traffic analysis. While many tools rely on legacy technologies such as NetFlow collection, SNMP polling, custom performance agents, or active service checks, the ExtraHop system performs full-stream reassembly and full-content analysis to extract and archive valuable performance and health metrics in a real-time datastore.

For more information about the capabilities of the ExtraHop system, visit http://www.extrahop.com/products/.

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About ExtraHop Networks

ExtraHop Networks is a leading provider of network-based application performance management (APM) solutions. The ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system performs the fastest and deepest analysis in the industry, achieving real-time transaction monitoring at speeds up to 10Gbps in a single appliance and application-level visibility with no agents, configuration, or overhead. The ExtraHop system quickly auto-discovers and auto-classifies applications and devices, delivering immediate value out of the box. ExtraHop Networks provides award-winning solutions to companies across a wide range of industries, including ecommerce, communications, and financial services. The privately held company was founded in 2007 by Jesse Rothstein and Raja Mukerji, engineering veterans from F5 Networks and architects of the BIG-IP v9 product. Follow us on Twitter @ExtraHop. For more information, visit www.extrahop.com.

Press Contacts

Justin Baker
ExtraHop Networks
206-453-2290
pr@extrahop.com

Events such as the recent hacking of U.S. Government officials’ Google Gmail accounts and Sony’s PlayStation Network as well as the RSA SecurID breach have highlighted the need for greater data security. In response, more popular applications and websites, including Facebook, Gmail, and Twitter, have made SSL encryption standard. In heavily regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services, HIPAA compliance and other data-protection laws also contribute to this elevated use of SSL encryption. In fact, according to the seventh edition of Palo Alto Networks’ Application Usage and Risk Report, more than 40 percent of businesses’ applications now are encrypted by SSL.

However, while this trend hopefully will keep data safe, SSL encryption can complicate application performance management (APM). An elementary premise for APM is that if you can’t see your network traffic, you can’t monitor the health and performance of your applications. So, when as much as 40% of an organization’s application data is encrypted with SSL, it creates a massive blind spot in network visibility.

These days, the processing requirements for decrypting SSL are greater than ever, too. We are starting to see increasing numbers of organizations switch over to using new, 2048-bit SSL encryption keys in accordance with the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) recent advisory. This change makes SSL more secure, but, of course, these more-complex keys also take even more time to decrypt.

The combination of more encrypted data and stronger encryption keys makes software-driven SSL decryption increasingly untenable due to the significant drain on processing resources they require. Business demands require real-time monitoring of application health and performance, and more-powerful hardware acceleration is needed to make sure that SSL blind spots don’t handicap an organization’s ability to keep business-critical processes from failing.

To meet these demands, we are very happy to announce that the ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system is now capable of completely hardware-driven SSL decryption of 2048-bit keys at network speeds—up to a sustained 10Gbps of network traffic. With this enhancement, organizations can leverage the real-time analysis capabilities of the ExtraHop system to decrypt and analyze SSL traffic for common cipher suites at the scale and speed required by today’s enterprise networks.

For more information about this functionality, see our official announcement regarding the addition of 2048-bit SSL decryption to eliminate organizations’ APM blind spot.