NetScreen Technologies was an American technology company that was acquired by

Juniper Networks Juniper Networks, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The company develops and markets networking products, including routers, switches, network management software, network security products, ...

for

US$ The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...

4 billion stock for stock in 2004. NetScreen Technologies developed

ASIC An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC ) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficien ...

-based Internet security systems and appliances that delivered high performance firewall, VPN and traffic shaping functionality to Internet data centers, e-business sites, broadband service providers and application service providers. NetScreen was the first firewall manufacturer to develop a gigabit-speed firewall, the NetScreen-1000.

History

NetScreen Technologies was founded by Yan Ke,

Ken Xie Ken Xie () is an American billionaire businessman who founded Systems Integration Solutions (SIS), NetScreen, and Fortinet. He is CEO of Fortinet, a cybersecurity firm based in Silicon Valley. Xie was previously the CEO of NetScreen, which was a ...

, and Feng Deng. Ken Xie, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder was also the CEO until Robert Thomas joined in 1998. Robert Thomas, NetScreen's president and chief executive officer, came to NetScreen in 1998 from Sun Microsystems, where he was General Manager of Intercontinental Operations for Sun's software business, which includes security, networking, and Internet tools. Ken Xie left NetScreen in 2000 to found

Fortinet Fortinet is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The company develops and sells cybersecurity solutions, such as physical firewalls, antivirus software, intrusion prevention systems, and endpoint secur ...

, a competing ASIC-based firewall company. NetScreen acquired its core IPS technology through the purchase of OneSecure, Inc. for US$45 million in stock in 2002. OneSecure was created by Rakesh Loonkar (subsequently the co-founder of

Trusteer Trusteer is a Boston-based computer security division of IBM, responsible for a suite of security software. Founded by Mickey Boodaei and Rakesh K. Loonkar, in Israel in 2006, Trusteer was acquired in September 2013 by IBM for $1 billion. Trust ...

), and Israeli engineer Nir Zuk, who had been one of Check Point Software’s first employees. In 2003, NetScreen hired Anson Chen as its vice president of research and development. Anson Chen, a 12-year veteran of Cisco Systems, Inc. and former vice president and general manager of the Network Management and Services Technology Group, led engineering, research and development efforts for NetScreen's entire product line, including its firewall, IPSec virtual private network (VPN) and intrusion detection and prevention technologies. Chen also had functional management responsibility for NetScreen's secure access products.

2015 "unauthorized code" incident

Analysis of the firmware code in 2015 showed that a backdoor key could exist using

Dual_EC_DRBG Dual_EC_DRBG (Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator) is an algorithm that was presented as a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator (CSPRNG) using methods in elliptic curve cryptography. Despite wide public criti ...

. This would enable whoever held that key to passively decrypt traffic encrypted by ScreenOS. In December 2015, Juniper Systems announced that they had discovered "unauthorized code" in the ScreenOS software that underlies their NetScreen devices, present from 2012 onwards. There were two vulnerabilities: One was a simple root password backdoor, and the other one was changing a point in Dual_EC_DRBG so that the attackers presumably had the key to use the pre-existing (intentional or unintentional)

kleptographic Kleptography is the study of stealing information securely and subliminally. The term was introduced by Adam Young and Moti Yung in the Proceedings of Advances in Cryptology—Crypto '96.A. Young, M. Yung, "The Dark Side of Black-Box Cryptography, ...

backdoor in ScreenOS to passively decrypt traffic.

References

{{Juniper Networks Juniper Networks Defunct companies based in California Computer companies established in 1997 Computer companies disestablished in 2004 Networking hardware companies Server appliance Computer security companies 2004 mergers and acquisitions 2001 initial public offerings