--On Friday, April 18, 2008 13:18:44 -0400 Jon Radel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Paul Schmehl wrote:
I see this statement all the time, and I wonder why. What does a
firewall on an individual host accomplish?
I have maintained publicly available servers for a small hobby domain
for almost ten years now. Initially, I bought in to this logic and ran
a firewall. (At that time we only had one server.) What it cost me was
CPU and memory. What it gained me was nothing. I turned it off. I have
never run a firewall on a publicly available host since.
Firewalls are for preventing access to running services. By definition,
if you are running a service, you want it to be accessed. So firewalls
are self-defeating or completely useless at the host level **unless**
you don't know what you're doing. For an enterprise they make a great
deal of sense. No matter what a user inside your network might do, you
can prevent access by simply not allowing traffic on that port.
Yes, in a world where nothing ever breaks, all system administrators
never make dumb mistakes, and no one ever breaks into your box to
install services that you certainly wouldn't approve of, the
defense-in-depth techniques being discussed here are pretty much a waste
of time. Alas, alack, my machines prove every couple of years that they
don't live in such a world. Must be me. ;-)
If *everyone* knew how to properly configure and maintain a host, even
enterprise firewalls would be completely unnecessary.
And if you've got users on your network.... Oh, my, users do the
darnedest things. As one little example: My firewall blocks outbound
traffic to port 25 from all those pesky workstations to anywhere other
than the local SMTP servers. Why? Makes me worry just a bit less about
some Windows box pumping spam out to the world due to an unfortunate
choice made by a user. I doubt there's an enterprise in the world where
every user both knows enough about host security *and* is disciplined
enough to apply that knowledge every minute of every day.
Let me clarify. When I use the term "host", I'm referring to what many would
call a "personal workstation" or "personal computer". If you have more than
one person who has shell access to a computer, then you no longer have a host.
You have a server. Sure, you may not think of it that way, but that's what it
is.
Servers are a completely different ballgame, and the decisions you make
regarding protecting them have everything to do with who has access to what.
The servers that I referenced in my post have one person with root access - me
- and one user - the owners. No one else has access. So, it's a great deal
easier for me to lock down the boxes than it is, for example, here at work,
where *many* people have shell access and more than one have root access
through sudo or even su.
But then, I'm the guy who takes the time to put on his seatbelt each and
every time he starts the car, despite never, not once, having to
actually use it in 3 decades of driving.
Well, that was the point I was trying to make. A firewall might be analagous
to a big rubber bumper that surrounds your car. *If* you get it, it provides
some protection, but you *still* have to be able to use the doors, open the
hood and the trunk, carry passengers, etc.
So, why do you wear your seatbelt? Because it provides protection *even when*
the bumpers fail.
We think about security from the outside in when we should be thinking about
security from the inside out. The firewall should be the *last* thing you
think about *after* you've already taken all the precautions you can to make
the firewall completely unnecessary.
In today's world, all too often, people think they can not patch, not run
antivirus, not do this, not do that, and everything will be fine because the
firewall is protecting them. It's foolish and a false sense of security. What
we *should* be doing is making sure the door locks function correctly (going
back to the car analogy), the seats are properly anchored, the engine is
properly maintained, the hood is properly closed, etc., etc. and *then* check
to see if the bumper is in place.
--
Paul Schmehl ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Senior Information Security Analyst
The University of Texas at Dallas
http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/security/
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