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Matthias "Maddes" Bücher
http://www.maddes.net/
Home: Earth / Germany / Ruhr-Area

On 12.08.2009 21:13, Matthias Buecher / Germany wrote:
> On 12.08.2009 14:56, Matthias Buecher / Germany wrote:
>> On 12.08.2009 10:50, Ferenc Wagner wrote:
>>> Matthias Buecher / Germany <[email protected]> writes:
>>>> When compiling a kernel prepared for all packages, then bridge
>>>> firewalling is enabled inside the kernel.
>>> Rather, I think you get the "problem" when you start the firewall.
>>>> This leads to "unexpected" behaviour for newbies and normal users: they
>>>> can not access other devices on the LAN.
>>> Well, I'd expect a firewall to filter traffic, actually.  It's more
>>> alarming that a couple of packets can slip through, as the Trac ticket
>>> #5640 shows.
>>>> Therefore disable bridge firewalling in sysctl.conf to avoid newbiw
>>>> problems.
>>> I'm not sure that less security by default is a good idea.  Especially
>>> via changing a long time Linux default.  If you don't want a firewall,
>>> why install and start it?
>> I agree that in general "less security by default" is not a good idea,
>> but in this special case it makes sense.
> 
>> * bridge firewalling is not on by default (see [1]). it just gets
>> activated when compiling the OpenWrt kernel from trunk with all packages.
> 
>> * the kernel mostly is compiled from trunk with all packages (seems also
>> true for the official snapshot), to be prepared for future uses (e.g.
>> kmod-tun for VPN) and to be able to use the official OpenWrt package
>> repository.
>>   if a kernel is used that wasn't compiled with all packages, then this
>> causes errors/crashes with several packages from the OpenWrt repository
>> (see #5341 for OpenVPN).
> 
>> * bridge firewalling is an additional kernel firewall for bridges. when
>> disabled, this doesn't mean that iptables is not working.
> 
>> * the typical bridge in OpenWrt is the LAN switch of a router. so it's
>> mainly an additional security for interal threads, not external threads.
> 
>> * the typical default behaviour of a router/switch is: allow all LAN
>> traffic and all outgoing WAN traffic, block all incoming WAN traffic.
> 
> 
>> The other "but" is the user side:
>> * Although I have some Linux experience and work as a programmer it took
>> me over 3 mandays to find the solution. A normal user will be totally lost.
>> * Someone who wants "bridge firewalling" will find it within some
>> minutes as he knows what he is looking for.
> 
> 
>> So in my eyes "bridge firewalling" is an extra security option for
>> experts, that have/want to protect the LAN ports against each others.
>> Therefore I would add these settings to the trunk, just like the already
>> existing more "insecure" settings (e.g. "net.ipv4.ip_forward=1" for VPN).
> 
> 
>> About the slip-through packets:
>> This only happens when starting the kernel, the bridge firewalling (not
>> iptables) seems to be enabled after the network.
>> So for some seconds some packets may not be "bridge firewalled" on startup.
> 
> 
>> [1] Linux bridge firewalling:
>> http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Bridge#Kernel_Configuration
> 
> Another solution would be to compile it as a separate module (BRIDGE=m).
> Then the user can decide if he want to install it or not.

The bridge firewalling is caused by CONFIG_BRIDGE_NETFILTER=y (bool),
which is enabled by kmod-ebtables. As it is bool it can not be
outsourced into an installable module.

So I think my initial patch is still a good and reasonable solution.

Maddes

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