For Security Architects

Details

How do you keep the management plane out of reach of production?

Put every console behind one appliance on its own management network. Switch consoles, firewall management interfaces and server BMCs are reachable whenever the rack is reachable. Left alone, that’s a standing management surface in every rack. The SLC 9000 gathers those consoles behind one 1RU appliance with its own uplinks, so admin access goes through an appliance you control instead of every device’s own management port.

The cloud side doesn’t add an inbound path either. The SLC 9000 registers to Percepxion device-side first over an outbound-only MQTT connection, so there’s no inbound firewall rule to the console server.

Who gets in, and how do they prove it?

Your identity stack decides, at both layers. On the device, login supports RADIUS, TACACS+, LDAP and local accounts, with Duo MFA through a RADIUS proxy. On Percepxion, SAML 2.0 SSO works with Okta, Azure AD or any SAML 2.0 provider, and RADIUS and TACACS+ group attributes map users into Percepxion groups. RBAC and MFA apply on top.

Scope follows the org chart. Percepxion organizes access by project, portal and organization, with three default roles and per-operation permissions, so a regional team sees its own console servers and nothing else.

The box starts clean, too. Default credentials are unique per unit and get changed at initial setup. There’s no shared vendor-wide password to hunt down across a fleet.

What can you hand an auditor?

A platform audit log tied to named people. The Percepxion audit log records management actions against the named user, and the event log is fully queryable through the REST API, so you can pull it into your own retention system on your schedule. Session activity is audit-logged; individual keystrokes are not recorded.

What’s the appliance’s own attack surface?

Small, and deliberately so. SLC 9000 firmware exposes no shell. Containers, where you use them, run sandboxed at 256 MB of memory and one CPU core. Every unit verifies its firmware image signature at boot through the NXP LayerScape secure element before it’s allowed to start.

Every SLC 9000 SKU also includes a discrete TPM 2.0 chip. The TPM 2.0 chip is present on every SKU; GA firmware does not yet use it for encryption or attestation. The SLC 9000 is not FIPS certified. We’d rather you design around exactly what ships than find the gap in a review.