The Sophos XG Firewall v18 Early Access Program is available now! Visit the v18 EAP group here.

The Firewall Product Team here at Sophos has been hard at work on the latest firewall release. It’s loaded with innovations, such as the all-new Xstream packet processing architecture and AI Threat Intelligence protection from zero-day threats.

Xstream Architecture

The Xstream packet processing architecture delivers new levels of visibility, protection and performance.

The new architecture has three major components:

Xstream DPI Engine – High-performance deep packet threat protection for AV, IPS, Web, App Control and SSL Inspection in a single proxy-less streaming engine. Xstream SSL Inspection – Industry-leading performance, flexibility and transparency into all SSL/TLS-encrypted traffic, including support for TLS 1.3 across all ports and applications. Xstream Network Flow FastPath – Automatic and policy-based intelligent offloading of trusted traffic processing delivered at wire speed to ensure your trusted, mission-critical traffic is always on the fast path.

Threat Intelligence Analysis

Another addition to v18 is Threat Intelligence Analysis, which is powered by SophosLabs and our deep learning technology. Using a range of threat modelling techniques to analyze files being downloaded or arriving in emails, this feature identifies and stops the latest zero-day threats before they get on the network.

Threat Intelligence Analysis also provides rich reporting and insights into the types of files entering your network with a quick overview in the form of a visual Threatometer (as shown below) as well as a comprehensive detailed reporting.



New Threat Intelligence Analysis Threatometer

Full List of What’s New

Your top requested features and many other enhancements related to SD-WAN, networking, firewall rule management, notifications and alerts, and many more have been packed into v18. Take a look at the full list of the features and details.

Targeted Timeline:

The Early Access Program (EAP) is expected to kick of for all Sophos customers and partners later this month. To provide everyone with a fantastic EAP experience the team is working hard to ensure the features in the initial EAP release are rock solid, so we appreciate your patience.

The XG Firewall v18 Early Access Program will have multiple phases over the coming months, with some features, noted in the What’s New Overview, delivered as part of later EAP phases.

We hope you are as excited about this new XG Firewall release as we are.