When SAFE is really safe
Posted by Mario Vuksan on Sun, Jan 11, 2009
We have been asked many times about SAFE, our "Software Approval for the Enterprise" mechanism. What is it and why is important? SAFE lays at the heart of Bit9 Parity system and it encapsulates the most complex part of Bit9 Parity end point system. It is Bit9's answer to mistakes made by the first generation of Whitelisting products, extending the concept to what we today refer to as "Application Whitelisting".
The greatest problem to solve with Whitelisting is the complexity that comes with management of millions of files that can be found on an average Enterprise network. Once an administrator os given the power to ban or approve every script, dll and executable, the responsibility is on him or her to do the right thing.
Bit9's SAFE implementation is a smart logic layer that can determine what a software application is, apart from the operating system and not including malicious hooking that could potentially promote an application trust to a malicious software component. As such, SAFE allows Bit9 Parity to view and manage software application as collections of files, giving them a distinct level of trust and manageability.
SAFE is Bit9's mechanism that truly distinguishes it from a standard blacklisting solution because it can be driven by numerous types of trust policies, be it by using digital certificates, trusted repositories or any other automatic approval method already in the Bit9 Parity arsenal.