ADS-TEC supports the BSI in trialling a new test procedure for security gateways using the ADS-TEC firewall

The BSI as Germany's national cyber-security authority is responsible for providing information security for digitisation on the basis of measures aimed at prevention, detection and reaction for state, economy and society.

As a pioneer and renowned IT specialist, ADS-TEC develops and produces industry-compatible firewalls and routers which, due to their high quality, are ideally suited for creating useful sce-narios and directives for a new certificate. In the pilot project with the BSI, an IRF2000 series firewall from ADS-TEC is to be thoroughly tested in close cooperation with three other re-nowned test laboratories. The objective is to use the results from these many trials to produce a German basic certificate for IT security. In future, successfully tested devices are to receive an appropriate basic certificate.

Firewalls are security gateways and consist of software and hardware components for hubs in information technology. They are used at central gateways in order to couple IP networks se-curely and to monitor data exchange. For this purpose, the technically possible communication is limited to a communication defined along security lines. This ensures that only the desired data streams pass between different networks.

In the meantime, such security gateways now perform a variety of tasks, such as packet filter-ing, virus protection or network monitoring. A firewall decides whether to allow or reject data transfer primarily on the basis of information which is contained in a packet and which indicates the source and target address as well as the connection. This prevents unnecessary packets from overloading the network or packets from the intranet from intentionally or inadvertently finding their way into the Internet.