Heh - that was why I said that I don't think it's a practical idea. I can't
see that it's possible. ALGs need to write stuff off to disk to work
properly, and the memory footprint and code complexity of an ALG is probably
too great to convert to a chip.
If your question is "why can't we run an ALG that doesn't have a HDD" then
that's different. Yeah, it would be kind of cool to run an ALG off RO media,
but I'm not sure how much more secure it is than an ALG running off "normal"
HDDs. There are only a limited number of attack vectors that you block, and
they don't seem to be the most common / most dangerous (based on the couple
of minutes I just spent thinking about it - I could be having a crazy
moment, though). Technically, it's very doable - RAM is cheap enough now to
have, say, a 1GB RAMdisk and boot off flash or a CD.
Cheers,
--
Ben Nagy
Network Security Specialist
Marconi Services Australia Pty Ltd
Mb: +61 414 411 520 PGP Key ID: 0x1A86E304
> -----Original Message-----
> From: acs [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 1:24 PM
> To: Ben Nagy; 'Steven Pierce'
> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: RE: Hardware or Software
[...]
> The
> interesting question is when will full featured
> application layer firewalls be running on "hardware"
> like this.
>
> acs
[...]
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