R80.40 EA Program

Check Point introduces the R80.40 Early Availability Program and is looking for customers willing to upgrade their R77.x/R80.x production environment to R80.40 EA and test the new features. Looking at the list of new features it promises a lot of exciting enhancements since R80.30.

This EA program is only open for production environments and customers that would like to work directly with R&D. A Public EA program for LAB environments has not been announced (yet).

You can sign up to the R80.40 EA Program here. The Public EA program starts mid-September 2019.

What’s New?

IoT Security

A new IoT security controller to:

• Collect IoT devices and traffic attributes from certified IoT discovery engines (currently supports Medigate, CyberMDX, Cynerio, Claroty, Indegy, SAM and Armis). 
• Configure a new IoT dedicated Policy Layer in policy management.
• Configure and manage security rules that are based on the IoT devices’ attributes.

TLS Inspection

HTTP/2

• HTTP/2 is an update to the HTTP protocol. The update provides improvements to speed, efficiency and security and results with a better user experience. 
• Check Point’s Security Gateway now support HTTP/2 and benefits better speed and efficiency while getting full security, with all Threat Prevention and Access Control blades, as well as new protections for the HTTP/2 protocol.
• Support is for both clear and SSL encrypted traffic and is fully integrated with HTTPS/TLS
• Inspection capabilities.

TLS Inspection Layer

This was formerly called HTTPS Inspection. Provides these new capabilities:

• A new Policy Layer in SmartConsole dedicated to TLS Inspection.
• Different TLS Inspection layers can be used in different policy packages.
• Sharing of a TLS Inspection layer across multiple policy packages.
• API for TLS operations.

Threat Prevention

• Overall efficiency enhancement for Threat Prevention processes and updates.
• Automatic updates to Threat Extraction Engine.
• Dynamic, Domain and Updatable Objects can now be used in Threat Prevention and TLS Inspection policies. Updatable objects are network objects that represent an external service or a known dynamic list of IP addresses, for example – Office365 / Google / Azure / AWS IP addresses and Geo objects.
• Anti-Virus now uses SHA-1 and SHA-256 threat indications to block files based on their hashes. Import the new indicators from the SmartConsole Threat Indicators view or the Custom Intelligence Feed CLI.
• Anti-Virus and SandBlast Threat Emulation now support inspection of e-mail traffic over the POP3 protocol, as well as improved inspection of e-mail traffic over the IMAP protocol.
• Anti-Virus and SandBlast Threat Emulation now use the newly introduced SSH inspection feature to inspect files transferred over the SCP and SFTP protocols.
• Anti-Virus and SandBlast Threat Emulation now provide an improved support for SMBv3 inspection (3.0, 3.0.2, 3.1.1), which includes inspection of multi-channel connections. Check Point is now the only vendor to support inspection of a file transfer through multiple channels (a feature that is on-by-default in all Windows environments). This allows customers to stay secure while working with this performance enhancing feature.

Access Control

Identity Awareness

• Support for Captive Portal integration with SAML 2.0 and third party Identity Providers.
• Support for Identity Agent Broker for scalable and granular sharing of identity information between PDPs, as well as cross-domain sharing. 
• Enhancements to Terminal Servers Agent for better scaling and compatibility.

IPsec VPN

• Configure different VPN encryption domains on a Security Gateway that is a member of multiple VPN communities. This provides: 
  • Improved privacy – Internal networks are not disclosed in IKE protocol negotiations.
  • Improved security and granularity – Specify which networks are accessible in a specified VPN community.
  • Improved interoperability – Simplified route-based VPN definitions (recommended when you work with an empty VPN encryption domain).
• Create and seamlessly work with a Large Scale VPN (LSV) environment with the help of LSV profiles.

URL Filtering

• Improved scalability and resilience.
• Extended troubleshooting capabilities.

NAT

• Enhanced NAT port allocation mechanism – on Security Gateways with 6 or more CoreXL Firewall instances, all instances use the same pool of NAT ports, which optimizes the port utilization and reuse.
• NAT port utilization monitoring in CPView and with SNMP.

Voice over IP (VoIP)

Multiple CoreXL Firewall instances handle the SIP protocol to enhance performance.

Remote Access VPN

Use machine certificate to distinguish between corporate and non-corporate assets and to set a policy  enforcing the use of corporate assets only. Enforcement can be pre-logon (device authentication only) or post-logon (device and user authentication).

Mobile Access Portal Agent

Enhanced Endpoint Security on Demand within the Mobile Access Portal Agent to support all major web browsers. For more information, see sk113410.

Security Gateway and Gaia

CoreX L and Multi-Queue

• Support for automatic allocation of CoreXL SNDs and Firewall instances that does not require a Security Gateway reboot.
• Improved out of the box experience – Security Gateway automatically changes the number of CoreXL SNDs and Firewall instances and the Multi-Queue configuration based on the current traffic load.

Clustering

• Support for Cluster Control Protocol in Unicast mode that eliminates the need for CCP

Broadcast or Multicast modes.

• Cluster Control Protocol encryption is now enabled by default.
• New ClusterXL mode -Active/Active, which supports Cluster Members in different geographic locations that are located on different subnets and have different IP addresses.
• Support for ClusterXL Cluster Members that run different software versions.
• Eliminated the need for MAC Magic configuration when several clusters are connected to the same subnet.

VSX

• Support for VSX upgrade with CPUSE in Gaia Portal.
• Support for Active Up mode in VSLS.
• Support for CPView statistical reports for each Virtual System

Zero Touch

A simple Plug & Play setup process for installing an appliance – eliminating the need for technical expertise and having to connect to the appliance for initial configuration.

Gaia REST API

Gaia REST API provides a new way to read and send information to servers that run Gaia Operating System. See sk143612.

Advanced Routing

• Enhancements to OSPF and BGP allow to reset and restart OSPF neighboring for each CoreXL Firewall instance without the need to restart the routed daemon.
• Enhancing route refresh for improved handling of BGP routing inconsistencies.

New kernel capabilities

• Upgraded Linux kernel
• New partitioning system (gpt):
  • Supports more than 2TB physical/logical drives
  • Faster file system (xfs)
  • Supporting larger system storage (up to 48TB tested)
  • I/O related performance improvements
• Multi-Queue:
  • Full Gaia Clish support for Multi-Queue commands
  • Automatic “on by default” configuration
• SMB v2/3 mount support in Mobile Access blade
• Added NFSv4 (client) support (NFS v4.2 is the default NFS version used)
• Support of new system tools for debugging, monitoring and configuring the system

CloudGuard Controller

• Performance enhancements for connections to external Data Centers.
• Integration with VMware NSX-T.
• Support for additional API commands to create and edit Data Center Server objects.

Security Management

Multi-Domain Server

• Back up and restore an individual Domain Management Server on a Multi-Domain Server.
• Migrate a Domain Management Server on one Multi-Domain Server to a different Multi-Domain Security Management.
• Migrate a Security Management Server to become a Domain Management Server on a Multi-Domain Server.
• Migrate a Domain Management Server to become a Security Management Server.
• Revert a Domain on a Multi-Domain Server, or a Security Management Server to a previous revision for further editing.

SmartTasks and API

• New Management API authentication method that uses an auto-generated API Key.
• New Management API commands to create cluster objects.
• Central Deployment of Jumbo Hotfix Accumulator and Hotfixes from SmartConsole or with an API allows to install or upgrade multiple Security Gateways and Clusters in parallel.
• SmartTasks – Configure automatic scripts or HTTPS requests triggered by administrator tasks, such as publishing a session or installing a policy.

Deployment

Central Deployment of Jumbo Hotfix Accumulator and Hotfixes from SmartConsole or with an API allows to install or upgrade multiple Security Gateways and Clusters in parallel.

SmartEvent

Share SmartView views and reports with other administrators.

Log Exporter

Export logs filtered according to field values.

Endpoint Security

• Support for BitLocker encryption for Full Disk Encryption.
• Support for external Certificate Authority certificates for Endpoint Security client authentication and communication with the Endpoint Security Management Server.
• Support for dynamic size of Endpoint Security Client packages based on the selected features for deployment.
• Policy can now control level of notifications to end users.
• Support for Persistent VDI environment in Endpoint Policy Management.