Using CESA to Solve Endpoint Blindness for a World Class InfoSec Team

Cisco has an amazing set of products like AMP for Endpoints and Cisco Umbrella protecting devices from advanced malware threats.  There were other user and endpoint scenarios that remained unsolved until we introduced the new Cisco Endpoint Security Analytics (CESA) solution that was recently announced.  CESA provides an unprecedented level of endpoint and user networking visibility built on Cisco AnyConnect Network Visibility Module (NVM) endpoint telemetry and Splunk Enterprise.   Underlying the NVM technology is a protocol called nvzFlow (en-vizzy-flow) that I have blogged about in the past.

Why Did We Build CESA?

The CESA solution was originally developed by the Office of the Security CTO and then integrated into Cisco AnyConnect and Splunk products to solve a set of issues for Cisco InfoSec.  Cisco InfoSec realized that getting all the endpoint visibility they needed to perform incident response was a challenge. There were also endpoint security blind spots as more Cisco employees were working off premise and connecting to both enterprise and cloud resources.  They needed a way to collect and store a year of data for analysis of incidents while also getting information in real‑time to see what is happening in the network.  You can read more about the Cisco InfoSec use case in their case study on CESA.

The Office of the Security CTO looks at current and future customer problems that are not being solved by existing technology and then come up with ideas on how to solve them.  My fellow co-inventors, Andrew Zawadowskiy and Donovan O’Hara from the CTO Advanced Development team built the initial Proof of Concept and then worked on the final product release with the AnyConnect development team.

As we thought about ways to solve the problems Cisco InfoSec was facing, we wanted to do it in a way that built on standards technology so that not only could Cisco Stealtwatch and Cisco Tetration support it, but also provide an ecosystem for key partners to participate.  This is why we chose to build on IPFIX.  It is the perfect protocol to build the enhanced  context found in nvzFlow.  What do we mean by “Enhanced Context”?

The 5 key endpoint visibility categories conveyed by the protocol or “Enhanced Context” are:

User

Device

Application

Location

Destination

At the end of the blog will be a helpful table to show you details of the enhanced context that is provided.

Working with Great Partners like Splunk and Samsung

One of the key features of CESA is Splunk Enterprise, which performs the analytics and alerting on the NVM telemetry, turning it into actionable events. The new CESA Built on Splunk product, available exclusively from Cisco, provides a Splunk package customized and priced specifically for analyzing NVM telemetry.  Cisco InfoSec has been using the CESA solution for over two years now.  As noted earlier, you can read more about it in their Case Study.

Spunk Enterprise is a fantastic tool.  It was really easy for us to take the Cisco AnyConnect NVM data and not only import it into Splunk, but to also quickly create a high value set of dashboards and reports from the data.   There are two components in the Splunk store that make up the solution: Cisco AnyConnect Network Visibility Module (NVM) App for Splunk and Cisco NVM Technology Add-on for Splunk.  Because NVM produces so much high value data, Splunk created a special per-endpoint license available exclusively from Cisco that makes budgeting predictable and saves you money.  We also put together a helpful deployment guide to get you going.

Below is an example of the dozens of reports available in the AnyConnect NVM Splunk Dashboard.
As you can see the solution provides visibility into what applications are connecting to what domains and how much data is being transmitted/received.

From there, you can then drill down on the specific application and obtain finer grained details including the SHA256 hash of the process, the names of domains and IP addresses it connected to, what account it is running under, etc.  Just click on the specific element and it will take you to an investigation page for that observable.

You can easily integrate your favorite investigation tools right into the Splunk Enterprise dashboards.  For example, you can pivot from a DNS domain name observable into Cisco Umbrella, Talos Intelligence or Cisco Threat Response with just a couple lines of HTML.  This will allow you to obtain a threat disposition on the domain.

Similarly, you can take the SHA256 hash observable and pivot right into AMP for Endpoints, ThreatGrid or Cisco Threat Response.  This will allow you to obtain a threat disposition on the binary.

We’ve provided those integrations for you in the default dashboards. You can easily add more just by editing them to include your favorite tools.  Let us know if there is anything else that would be useful in the default screens.

Samsung has been another excellent partner from the start.  We have worked with them closely on their Knox program for a number of years with AnyConnect integrations and neat features like per-app VPN.  When we explained to them what we wanted to do with Cisco AnyConnect NVM, they were excited to help and developed the Network Platform Analytics (NPA) framework to make it possible.  It is the only framework available on mobile platforms to support Cisco AnyConnect NVM.  The best part is that you can enable and provision this capability using your favorite Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solution – no special device-mode needed!  Keep an eye out for a forthcoming quick‑start guide on this technology.  NVM is also available on Windows, MacOS and Linux platforms.

Those are some of the high points of the CESA Built on Splunk solution.  If you’d like to get into further technical details on the solution architecture and NVM telemetry itself, see my post on our Cisco Community Page.