After the discovery of the Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption or POODLE vulnerability and Heartbleed exploits; PCI downgraded the SSL protocol stating that it can no longer be used as a security control after 30 June 2016. Instead, organisations needing to stay compliant must switch ciphers to the newer TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2 standards.

“The latest upgrade to Pulse Connect Secure provides a deeper level of control over the encryption ciphers and deployment parameters allowing administrators to create the most secure environments that meet industry best practice and stringent PCI compliance requirements,” explains Kevin Sapp, VP, Strategy for Pulse Secure, “The update has been built based on extensive feedback and guidance from a number of clients, particularly within financial services to ensure that the new features allow for a seamless and zero downtime transition as organisations aimed to meet the end of June deadline.”

Pulse Connect Secure is a leading mobile VPN to enable secure access from any device to enterprise apps and services in the data centre or cloud, and according to the company, the platform is used by 80% of the Fortune 50 and secures over 18 million endpoints.

“Building flexibility and ensuring that product updates are delivered in a timely fashion is vital in a world where even trusted standards such as SSL may need to be replaced due to unforeseen issues,” says Sapp, “The latest granular cipher update is part of a continual development roadmap that has recently added Secure Single Sign-On to Cloud Applications (SAML), proxy authentication for Java and support for RSA Authentication Manager Risk Based Authentication.”