Overview
PowerSC provides a web-based user interface to address four pillars of Security and Compliance functionality: Compliance, Security, Patch Management and Multifactor Authentication. These four pillars play together in managing a systems Security and Compliance.
Compliance: From a Compliance perspective, clients are trying to make their system secure across all VMs running on Power. PowerSC provides pre-built compliance profiles for regulated industries such as: HIPPA for healthcare, PCI for credit card procession, DoD STIG for the Department of defense, and so forth. These pre-built profiles frequently get updated in the product and customers can create custom profiles who they can pull rules out of the pre-built profiles to create their own customized environment.
Security: From a real-time security perspective, there are a variety of functions included to keep systems secure, to monitor them in realtime and to maintain security. Some features include: File Integrity Monitoring (FIM), allow listing, threat hunting, full anti-malware support for AIX and Linux (RHEL and SUSE) and Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) capabilities.
Patch Management: Patch Management is a key part in keeping systems secure as it is about detecting VMs that do not satisfy patch management policies or identifying if a security patch is missing. Patch Management status can be viewed for all Power endpoints from a single PowerSC dashboard and updates can be triggered directly from the PowerSC GUI.
- On AIX endpoints, Patch Management is implemented through Trusted Network Connect, an extensive policy-based patch management capability for AIX.
- On Linux (RHEL and SUSE) endpoints, Patch Management is implemented using standard yum and zypper commands.
Multifactor Authentication: Multifactor Authentication is about ensuring that only authenticated users have access to the system by leveraging various factors to authenticate a user. The types of factors include:
- something you know, such as a password or pin
- something you have, such as an ID badge
- something you are, such as a fingerprint support or facial recognition
What’s new in PowerSC 2.1.0.5
In the 2.1.0.5 release we have added many exciting updates to IBM PowerSC
There are two updates to our pre-built Compliance Profiles:
- The SAP HANA profile was previously available on AIX and on Linux SUSE and in the 2.1.0.5 release we have made this profile available on Linux RHEL endpoints.
- The CIS profile for AIX was previously available in accordance to the AIX 7.1 benchmark document and now the profile is available based off the AIX 7.2 benchmark document.
We have added allow-listing support on Linux SUSE based off an fapolicyd packaging. Allow listing is a kernel-based, anti-malware approach and is currently available on AIX using the trusted execution infrastructure and on RHEL using fapolicyd.
We currently have intrusion detection available on Linux and are extending the functionality to AIX. Intrusion detection analyzes traffic on the VM where it is installed and most commonly uses host-based firewall logs to collect information on nearly every field of the network and transport packet headers.
There is an agent update through the GUI which allows the ability to push installation of a new PowerSC version to endpoints using the PSC GUI. For example, when upgrading from 2.1.0.5 to the next release, customers will simply upgrade the server, then select endpoints through the GUI and tell PSC to upgrade them.
Event DB rotation with history retention days specification gives the ability to specify how many days of history should be retained, using the pscuiserverctl command.
For PowerSC Multificator Authentication, we have the following updates:
- We have enhanced the IBM i ssh connection. In the past it required periodic restarts and so this enhancement is expected to resolve that requirement.
- We added an allow setting policy for PMFA, which is designed to be the default-policy to minimize prompting and will no longer require the need to enter policy name if it is the only one that is used.
- We have an AIX re-package, which removes the Power box USB port smart-card support and requires customer-installation of dependencies such as Postgres. This is just like what we currently do on Linux.
** Do you use PowerSC? **
Yes: If you use PowerSC, we would like to invite you to take a quick survey on PowerSC: https://survey.medallia.eu/?ibm-onprem-offering&offeringId=5765PSE&longVersion=Yes&testFlag=No&productType=3
No: If you are not currently using PowerSC, would you like to hear more about it and see a demo? If so, please contact Debbie Quick <dquick@us.ibm.com>
PowerSC Free Trial Download
- PowerSC 2.1 90-day free trial
https://epwt-www.mybluemix.net/software/support/trial/cst/welcomepage.wss?siteId=1287&tabId=3451&w=1
- Download requires acceptance of clickthrough license agreement
- Try/Buy license allows seamless transition to production deployment
PowerSC Reference Links
