In a recent interview, Ariana Lynn, Principal Analyst at The Fast Mode spoke to Jerry Chen, Co-Founder of Firewalla on the impact of traffic visibility on modern IP networks. Jerry joins us in a series of discussions with leading networking, analytics and cybersecurity companies, assessing the need for traffic filtering technologies that can deliver real-time, granular application awareness. The series explores how advanced analytics power various network functions amidst the rapid growth in traffic and applications.
Ariana: How do your solutions and products fulfill the demands of today's networks?
Jerry: We started the Firewalla project in 2016. During that time, 100Mb network speeds were considered fast, and very few people were worried about hackers attacking homes and small businesses. We were in the first batch of people building something simple to use but powerful enough to stop attacks.
We firmly believe simplicity is critical to securing anything, especially networks. The simplicity we're talking about isn't a one-button security solution; instead, we take existing security concepts and present them to our customers differently. We give users a simple interface that makes both basic management and advanced configurations easy. Everyday home users can operate our devices without consulting Stack Overflow, but they're still powerful enough for IT professionals.
Through the years, cybersecurity has started getting more attention, and we've grown from just a basic single-port gadget to a collection of robust multi-port routers and useful accessories. With the upcoming Firewalla Gold Pro, we'll offer an option to handle and protect 10Gbit networks for home consumers with deep packet inspection and our signature IDS/IPS solutions.
Ariana: How important is traffic visibility for your suite of solutions and products?
Jerry: Having full network visibility is foundational to Firewalla's products. We're the only consumer, prosumer, and small business product that gives customers a straightforward view of exactly what is happening on their network. Whether someone's just looking for a summary of their network activity or a deep view of their traffic flows, having complete visibility helps secure homes and businesses by giving customers a window directly into what they're running on their network.
This visibility is the core of our IDS and IPS solutions, which detect abnormalities and actively protect Firewalla networks. They also give the customer awareness of what all their devices, including elusive IoT devices, are doing. Our products keep users up-to-date on everything from a new device joining their network to more complex events like abnormal uploads or devices with open credentials.
For home users, this visibility can also show how kids spend their time online, what they're doing, and how long they're doing it. This level of transparency helps parents properly manage their kids' online activity and promote healthy Internet use.
Ariana: What are your views on open-source software for delivering visibility?
Jerry: Open-source software isn't friendly to the average user. It may be valuable from an IT perspective, but it's definitely too cryptic for a typical consumer or small business owner. Even simple things like NMAP require command line inputs, which are often out of reach of regular home users.
What Firewalla does best is take open-source software and present it in a way that's accessible to everyone. For example, Firewalla can capture flow logs from Zeek and tell users how much YouTube their kids have watched today. From there, we can enable customers to limit YouTube access using iptables. While all these softwares are open-source, figuring out how to get something useful from them can be a long and frustrating process. Firewalla handles the difficult part for our customers by adding meaning to confusing network settings and translating obscure output into something an average person can actually understand.
Our smartphone app is something that everyone can use, regardless of their IT knowledge. Additionally, we take pride in providing clear, customer-centered support and documentation.
Before founding Firewalla, Jerry spent nearly 20 years working at Cisco Systems, where he was a senior manager and ran many projects in Security Technology Group, Core Routing Group, and Consumer Business Unit. He was also a member of the Cisco InfoSec Team, focusing on data protection. Jerry graduated from University of California at Santa Barbara with MS and BS in Electrical Engineering.
This interview is a part of The Fast Mode's Traffic Visibility segment, featuring leading networking, analytics and cybersecurity companies and their views on the importance of network intelligence and DPI for today's IP networks. A research report on this topic will be published in June 2024 - for more information, visit here.
