R81.20 Public EA Program

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Check Point Quantum R81.20 is packed with new features. that offer elasticity, efficiency, and innovative security enhancements

Quantum IoT Protect offers enterprise IoT device discovery embedded into Quantum Gateways and applies autonomous zero-trust policies that are automatically updated based on device type, risk level, and industry best practice, This makes it easy to secure IP cams, smart TVs, Wi-Fi printers, and much more.

Zero-Day Phishing Prevention, powered by patented technologies and AI engines, prevents access to the most sophisticated phishing websites, both known and completely unknown, without the need to install and maintain clients on end-user devices.

Continuing to innovate Maestro, including several new features that improve efficiency, elasticity, and compatibility with public clouds. The new Autoscaling feature in Maestro Hyper-scale lets you automatically allocate resources across Security Groups (based on your priorities), bringing cloud-like scale and agility to your prem-based security (for example, to accommodate peak traffic hours). To support high-speed, high-volume transaction environments (e.g. digital trading), Maestro now offers accelerated data paths for higher throughput and lower latency based on predefined rules (“Fast Forwarding”).

Enhancing the gold standard in Security Management: Quantum R81.20 lets you leverage the new Management API to integrate security from the ground up and efficiently manage access policies with support for dynamic policy objects taken from external sources. A new workflow now supports policy change management to minimize errors, allowing verification for new policies before they are applied and enforced throughout (“4 Eyes Principle”). By automating VPN connections to public clouds, R81.20 makes it easy to connect your Quantum Gateways with data centers hosted in the public cloud. Offering simplified user authentication with third party SAML Identity Providers, authentication is modernized and improved for administrators to log-in to SmartConsole as well as remote users accessing corporate assets. This enables SSO, MFA, and compliance checks, and complements current support for third-party Identity Providers with the Identity Awareness blade.

Enrollment | Public EA Check Point Public EA is design for lab and sandbox deployments only.

UserCenter:

Register to the Public EA release via - usercenter.checkpoint.com -> TRY OUR PRODUCTS -> Early Availability Programs -> CPEA-EVAL-R81.20 

PartnerMAP:

Register to the Public EA release via - usercenter.checkpoint.com -> CUSTOMER ACQUISITIONS-> Early Availability Programs -> CPEA-EVAL-R81.20

IMPORTANT NOTE 

• Check Point Public EA is design for lab and sandbox deployments only.
• Public EA version upgrade to GA is not supported

Enrollment | Quantum IoT Protect EA

In order to enroll, please reach out to IoT-Protect@checkpoint.com with your account ID on the Infinity Portal 

(portal.checkpoint.com -> Global Setting -> Account ID) 

New in this release

Quantum Security Gateway and Gaia Threat Prevention Prevent browsing to Zero-Day phishing websites Check Point Quantum Security Gateway enhances its web browsing protection to further prevent users from accessing phishing websites. Powered by patented technologies and AI engines, the Security Gateway now uses Clientless In-Browser protection to prevent access to the most sophisticated phishing websites, both known and completely unknown (zero-day phishing websites). The enhanced solution is available through the Security Gateway network flow, introducing dynamic security components that run within the browser with no need to install any client. Delivered as part of your existing NGTX license. Works out of the box for Security Gateways with Autonomous Threat Prevention enabled. Up to 50% performance enhancement to IPS CIFS protections. IOC feeds now support a significantly increased capacity in the number of observables for URLs, Domains, IP addresses, and Hashes - 2 million and up to hardware limit. Maestro Hyperscale Maestro Auto-Scaling - Automatically assigns Security Appliances (scale units) to a Security Group when the configured conditions are met. Maestro Fastforward -Significantly Improved throughput and latency for trusted connections. Maestro Fastforward offloads accept or drop policy rules to the Maestro Hyperscale Orchestrator for hardware acceleration. Sub microseconds latency. Port line-rate throughput for single connection. Support for Accelerated policy installation on Maestro Security Gateways. For more information see sk169096 . Support gradual upgrade with Multi Version Cluster (MVC) Based on the current traffic load, the Security Gateway automatically changes the number of CoreXL SNDs, Firewall instances and the Multi-Queue configuration for zero traffic impact. Management Data Plane Separation (MDPS) support for Scalable Platforms. IoT Protect Leverage Quantum Security Gateway and Infinity to instantly discover IoT devices and enforce independent Zero-Trust policies. Only allow what's needed for the device to operate. Automatic grouping based on device type. IPsec VPN Seamless site-to-site tunnel establishment with AWS native cloud VPN. Setup a route-based VPN tunnel with a virtual Gateway with just a few simple steps. Major performance and stability improvement for Remote Access and Site to Site VPN that delivers a much higher capacity for VPN tunnels. Extended Security Gateway certificate validation capabilities for faster authentication. Scalable VPN – Multi process architecture to process IKE negotiation (IKED) Access Control Network Feed Object - Use a Network Feed object to get dynamic IPs or domains of a specific external service that is not included in the Updatable Objects options. In addition, the user can create its own service containing a list of IPs or domains and have them in his policy. The object is automatically updated in Security Gateway without the need to install the policy. Performance improvements - support for Updatable Objects, Domain objects, and Dynamic objects with the Optimized Drop feature (drop templates). Advanced Routing Support for Intermediate System (IS-IS) routing protocol. DHCP Relay Agent Information Option 82 that addresses several scaling and security issues arising in public DHCP use. OSPFv3 NSSA support. IPv6 Static MFC Cache to enable forwarding of multicast data without PIM configuration. Support for Routed control scripts to allow ClusterXL fail-over and tear down of BGP connections. Routing Protocol History for BFD to improve troubleshooting capabilities. Netflow Live connections and Firewall rule ID UUID.

Gaia Operating System Configure a retention policy for Gaia scheduled backups and snapshots. Using the CLI, monitor the module temperature, module supply voltage, TX Bais voltage, Rx optical Power, and TX optical power for a single transceiver or all transceivers on an appliance. Automatic update to the NIC firmware during the ISO installation process for appliances that have 40GbE, 100/25GbE, and/or NVIDIA ConnectX 100G Cards. CoreXL HyperFlow ·         Increases throughput of elephant connections. ·         Automatically detects and dynamically allocates CPU cores between main tasks on a Security Gateway. ·         Improves CoreXL FWK processes response time. In UserSpace Firewall (USFW), the number of IPv6 instances can equal the number of IPv4 instances, this allows the gateway to process a more significant amount of IPv6 traffic Identity Awareness The Identity Awareness Gateway automatically identifies and excludes Service Account sessions acquired by the Identity Collector. For more details, see sk174266. Improved resiliency, scalability, and stability for PDPs and Identity Brokers. Additional threads handle authentication and authorization flows. Automatic tuning of nested LDAP groups - The Identity Awareness Gateway automatically chooses the optimal way to query the LDAP server for users and groups. During a PDP failure, a PEP Identity Awareness Gateway can recover its identity database from connected PDP Gateways. Identity Collector is now supported with Quantum Spark Appliances. Mobile Access Oauth 2.0 support for Capsule Workspace and Office 365. Quantum Security Management General Performance improvements to IPS updates and utilization. SmartConsole Administrators can use SAML 2.0 to configure SmartConsole users to authenticate with an Identity Provider. SmartWorkflow Send policy and configuration changes for peer review and approval before publishing. Management REST API Management API support for: Identity Awareness configuration on gateways and clusters. HTTPS Inspection outbound certificate configuration. Creation of LSM Gateways. Creation of LSM Gateways VPN configuration. Upgrades Central Deployment- Use SmartConsole to Gradually upgrade Quantum Cluster Members. Upgrade Quantum Spark and Quantum Edge Appliances. Pre-Upgrade Verifier results are now presented in the upgrade report. Significant performance improvement by importing Domain Management Servers concurrently instead of sequentially. CloudGuard Network Security CloudGuard Controller support for: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Nutanix New Azure resources – Application Security Groups, Private Endpoints New AWS resources – Load Balancer tags Nutanix Flow support for CloudGuard Network Security Gateways. Amazon Web Services (AWS): Security Gateway, Single, High Availability Cluster, Auto Scaling Group (ASG), Gateway Load Balancer Auto Scaling Group (ASG), Transit Gateway with ASG. AWS Gateway Load Balancer support. Harmony Endpoint Endpoint Policy Management Use SSO to connect to the Endpoint Web Management Console. Remote Access VPN Exclude SAAS applications (such as Office 365) from the remote-access VPN Domain. Authenticate Remote Access VPN users with SAML.