Securing Your Business with Cisco ASA and PIX Firewalls

Summary

Authentication represents one of the basic foundations of defense in depth and should be deployed in every network infrastructure. You should follow a few basic best practices to keep your network secure, including the following:

• Don't allow privileged access to the outside of your security appliance.

• Use hard-to-guess usernames and passwords.

• Do not use clear text protocols such as HTTP and Telnet for device management.

• Use ASDM or SSH for ASA/PIX Security Appliance management. Both use full encryption for data, as well as authentication credentials.

• Check your logs frequently to make sure that there is no unauthorized access occurring.

• Consider AAA to add value in logging and authentication flexibility.

In addition to device management authentication, ...