We have written many entries in the past on Tofino, OPSAID, PatriotSCADA, AGA12 devices and other field security appliances. (Note: Field firewall is not accurate so we will be using Field Security Appliance from this point forward). A few people pointed out to me that we were remiss in not talking about the Innominate mGuard firewall.

If you want the product line facts, check out our Innominate mGuard SCADApedia page.

mGuard has one major advantage over most of the competition, excepting Siemens, it exists. The first mGuard shipped in 2005 and about 10,000 have already been deployed, albeit not all in an industrial environment. Innominate currently does not have distribution in the US which partially explains why they have not garnered as much attention here as some of their competitors in development or beta.

The EAGLE model is the most applicable for a field site in both form factor and environmental specifications.  It will be interesting to see how the competition measures in the environmental specification area. Clearly this is an area where the IT security companies have failed in their efforts to address the control systems market.

Hirschmann resells the mGuard and if you look closely, you will also see the EAGLE model private labeled by a couple of control system manufacturers.

Innominate wrote the firewall and VPN code rather than use iptables and open source IPSEC code. This has pro’s and con’s and is different than most of their competitors who integrated open source code and focused on the packaging and management.