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SmoothWall Firewall Review
Daniel Goscomb, one of the lead developers of Smoothwall, responds:
In our opinion this article is extremely badly researched and written. Furthermore it shows a lack of knowledge on the author's part.
The main concern he has is that of people being able to log in to the firewall and read configuration files. This point is irrelevant as there is only a single user that can access the shell, root. This also removes the need of shadow password files, if you have access to the machine to get the passwd file, you are already in as root anyhow.
Secondly he complains of plain text passwords for the ppp passwords. This is not our doing. The passwords are stored in this format as pppd requires them to be in plain text in the two files. He also mentions that the permissions of these files are wrong. If he looked a little more closely he would have seen that they are in fact symlinks to the 2 real files, which do have the proper permissions on them.
He also mentions the same "problem" with the shared keys system in FreeSWAN. Again, they are stored like this as FreeSWAN requires them in this format to read them.
As to the part about user authentification of the CGI scripts. This is completely irrelevant. There is no authentication in the CGI scripts. The authentication is done via .htaccess files, and has no interaction with the CGI at all, other than when you change the passwords.
I also find it disturbing that the author gave us no room for comment in his article, nor did i see anything to suggest he had even asked us about these so called "problems". We would have been happy to answer any questions he had.
Sincerely,
Daniel Goscomb.
I used smoothwall for a short time to evaluate it and technically it looked like quite a nice product, but then I started reading about the attitude of it's creator to the GPL.
Now I'm happy for people to write GPL software if they like, and I'm happy for people to write commecial software if they like, but smoothwall seems to want to get the benifits of both.
They seem to want to get make free use of other peoples work through the GPL, but to feel free to only release parts of their software commercialy. I'm not claiming they are breaking the GPL or anything, but there seems something very unfair about their approach.
Also if you get the GPL edition, there are all kinds of requests on the web site that you donate money to them "SmoothWall developers have kids and families too, and it's all about giving back to the people who helped you.
". And yet I would guess that about 90% of what they are giving out was written by other people and they don't suggest they are going to give 90% of their donations to them.
Again, nothing wrong with that, I just don't much like it.
Basically I suggest that people look at their web site, and search the internet for comments about the creators of this software and how unhappy some people are with them before they go and use it.
Sig is taking a break!
This debate seems to be over whether Smoothwall was designed to secure against attack from outside your DSL dialup or against attack from the inside. Shadow passwords are meant to provide a safeguard against dictionary attacks from logged-in users on a multiuser system. c't's complaint that there is no shadow password on a single-user system is valid; if you're worried about people in your own house trying to hack into your firewall.
It is true that internal security against logged in users can help defeat attackers who can only partially penetrate external defenses. If, for instance, you can only use a CGI bug to get ahold of the passwd file, you can leverage this with a dictionary attack if shadowing isn't installed. Provided you can disable the packet filter and attempt to login as root externally once you have the password... or even use an su type exploit from your original CGI bug. Either way, there are a lot of large corporations with bigger security holes than this.
However to claim that his review "shattered the illusion" of Smoothwall being a complete solution for home users is complete hyperbole. A home user who is trying to secure himself from internal attack from other logged in users in his house is probably pretty savvy in the first place and also has bigger problems. If the purpose of this product is have a CD you can ship to your parents to secure their DSL line against script Kiddiez and Hotmail's Traceroute function, then Smoothwall sounds to me like an outstanding effort.
c't': Two demerits.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
OpenBSD is a good solution for anyone with a 486 and 8MB RAM. It is fairly simple and easy to use. (If you are familiar with Unix).
./ heart...;-)
You can find all kinds of examples of how to set one up like here.
Older distro's used IPF, but as of 3.0 they use pf. You can read about pf here.
OpenBSD has gone 4 years without a remote hole in the default install. Pretty impressive.
But hey, only use it if you are SERIOUS about security AND don't want to pay anything.
Although you should consider helping fund the project out of the kindness of you
Every part of the system has a (hopefully low) propability to be successfully hacked. The more barriers you have, the securer your system is.
It's also worth nothing that the only interactive account is root. There are daemons running under different user ids (I assume in favor of the SW team). As with every remote exploit, these daemons are the entry gates. Also note that remote exploits by definition don't relate to any interactive accounts!
Now, if one service has been hacked, the whole system is already compromised because there are no shadow passwords, files have the wrong permissions, etc.
You can argue about the passwort files for remote connections. You can't argue about not using shadow passwords, that's just plain stupid.
It's like leaving your safe unlocked because there is already the locked front door...
Claus
Let's go even farther on this theme of bad choices.
You can logon directly to the root account remotely? You don't have to su first?
Ouch, but that's a major hole. That's like waving a Big Flag. Kiddies, look at this "firewall." Guess what account you should try?
Never allow remote logons to uid 0. Always at least force wheels to su.
There are CGIs available to manage the firewall? Oh, and they use port 81 to access it. How... creative. And it gets better. SSH is on port 222. Have you guys ever heard of port scanners? Custom ports is a way of flagging to intruders which firewall software is being used, except when the custom port pattern is unique.
I can go on. It has a built-in DHCP server. DHCP servers should never be mounted on external firewalls as their logfiles contain too much valuable information when the firewall's security is compromised.
Hmm, at least it has an HTTP proxy. Probably Squid. No SOCKS support though. And yes, it uses NAT. Gack.
Well anyway, maybe this c't review will convince a few people to give up a NAT-based solution. Sadly, they'll probably just go to another one.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
I have visited irc.smoothwall.org only once. I do feel, however, that my experience there alone was almost enough to discourage my use of the product. I joined the #smoothwall channel in hopes that I might find answers from knowledgable users or developers that I had been unable to find in any of the available documentation (all of which I read in its entirety).
:: Please do not expect free
Upon joining the channel, I was bombarded with the omnipresent topic, "Welcome to #smoothwall
support if you haven't donated. http://redirect.smoothwall.org/donate"
Ignoring the blatantly anti-open-source sentiment, I proceeded to ask about features and functionality that I feel are paramount to implementation of a device designed to secure my entire network. Before anyone so much as regarded my first question, I was bombarded with "Have you paid yet?" A simple 'not yet' got me my first response: "Can't you read the f**king topc?!"
Of course, I wasn't looking for support -- simply answers to questions about the products capabilities. Off to a great start.
In the end, my questions were answered, privately, by MacGyver, whose answers unfortunaely indicated that features I think are critical in a firewall are only available in the commercial version. To suggest a few:
- No support for multiple IP's on the external interface
- No ability to write filter rules for outbound traffic
- No inherent ability to manage IDS policies used by Snort
- No immediate planned support for a stateful kernel
etc...
Granted, I could accomplish all of these tasks through custom modifications to the product -- but that would defeat the purpose of the product in the first place -- to create a secure filtering firewall that can be easily and securely managed through an integrated portable interface without the need for extensive customization.
To comment on the article posted this evening, I think that despite the article author's process for review or lack thereof, SmoothWall's response was unacceptable. To say that passwords are not shadowed because the box has but the root user would be to say that Bind and Sendmail need not be firewalled because their latest revisions have no vulnerabilities...
yet.
To say that the open-source security packages that comprise the firewall _require_ clear-text passwords is to insult the intelligence of everyone here who knows better or has found more secure alternatives to the same problems in the past. The open-source community is not ignorant, nor are we fooled by any comapny's efforts to conceal laziness.
Security is an unknown. We place our confidence in hybrid hardware and software solutions that provide protection from the exploits we've identified already, but we expect that new vulnerabilities are inevitable. We cannot neglect commonly accepted security practices because our products have not yet been broken. The correlary would be to argue against home alarms because we already have a lock on the door.
A single layer of security is never enough. ESPECIALLY for a firewall. If this were to be an end-user distribution sitting _behind_ a firewall, the lack of external access would _probably_ be enough. However, as a firewall, such neglect for security practices that have a negligible effect on performance but provide such a significant measure of protection is both arrogant and ignorant at the same time.
In conclusion, neither the product's lackluster featureset, nor it's father company's poor customer support practices would have individually discouraged my using it.
Couple those with questionable security practices, though, and I can assure you that SmoothWall will never be enough to protect _my_ network...
My major concern is not, that somebody other than the administrator might log into the machine. The major issue of a firewall system is, to tighten security, not to remove existing security mechanisms like tight access rigts to sensitive files, shaddow passwords, etc. But that is exactly what Smoothwall does in direct comparism to any standard linux distribution.
I'm sorry, if the text doesn't make it clear, that I'm not complaining about the format of files but about sensitive files with passwords or secret keys, that are world readable (ie mode 0644). Something like
is a bad thing - period.
I made every effort, to get "printable" response from the developers. I wrote several E-Mails about the issues to Richard Morrel - who was named as contact person- and I went to the IRC channel of the developers. The only printable comment to the subject I got there is "This doesn't matter".