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2Basic Concepts
McAfee® Host Intrusion Prevention is a host-based intrusion protection system. It
protects against known and unknown attacks, including worms, Trojan horses, buffer
overflow, critical system file modification, and privilege escalation. Host Intrusion
Prevention management is delivered through the ePolicy Orchestrator console and
provides the ability to set and apply host intrusion prevention, firewall, application
blocking, and general policies. Host Intrusion Prevention clients are deployed to servers
and desktops and function as independent protective units. They report their activity to
ePolicy Orchestrator and retrieve updates for new attack definitions.
This section describes the four features of Host Intrusion Prevention and how it works
with ePolicy Orchestrator, and includes the following topics:
IPS feature
Firewall feature
Application Blocking feature
General feature
Policy management
Deployment and management

IPS feature

The IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) feature monitors all system and API calls and
blocks those that might result in malicious activity. Host Intrusion Prevention
determines which process is using a call, the security context in which the process
runs, and the resource being accessed. A kernel-level driver, which receives redirected
entries in the user-mode system call table, monitors the system call chain. When calls
are made, the driver compares the call request against a database of combined
signatures and behavioral rules to determine whether to allow, block, or log an action.

Signature rules

Signature rules are patterns of characters than can be matched against a traffic stream.
For example, a signature rule might look for a specific string in an HTTP request. If the
string matches one in a known attack, action is taken. These rules provide protection
against known attacks.