Slashdot Mirror
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.
It's secure, featurefull and easy to configure - what more could you want?
For an affordable, very easy to configure, and speedy (excellent performance on my 386/33 with 8mb ram) firewall/gateway, you just can't beat sharethenet. I had it up and running in 1/2 hour, and there is almost no performance difference when I have my cable modem hooked up directly to my speedy p3 desktop. It "embeds" linux by loading it from a floppy onto a ram disk. If you get hacked, simply restart your machine, and you are back to factory settings. Downside is you need dedicated hardware, but OTOH, that hardware can be very old and still perform.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
we have an article taking what dang has said along with our comments on the way the article author behaved when collecting his "evidence" ...
our response
neuro at well dot com (when I post, it's my opinions, no-one elses)
as c't is (imho ofcourse) a much respected magazine, and normally I would call it a trustworthy source. I would certainly not expect them to publish such a damaging article without giving the authors of Smoothwall a chance to comment on the findings.
karma capped
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
He says shadow files are irrelvant as the box has only one account, root. Whatever happened to rule # 1 of having your web server and CGI's run as a different user ?
I hope it is on-subject enough to point out that I believe this is an excellent job Slashdot has done, going out and getting the rebuttal for the review. Although it is not quite perfect -- it acts partially to discredit the link source -- it is much closer to what I think Slashdot could be, a first-run news source with original articles -- for [nerds|geeks]. Until then, while the editors post their comments after a link, it's little more than the second-run movie theatres (which have their place, don't get me wrong). Thanks, Slashdot.
I was in the Smoothwall IRC channel on several occasions when this reporter came in. First of all he didn't conduct himself like any other reporter I have ever met. He was elusive regarding his motives (ie he wouldn't say he was from the press), he was beligerent beyond belief and gave the impression he already knew what he was going to write. Refusing to even listen to the dev team's answers, the sticking the fingers in the ears behaviour he exhibited was most flattering. I just hope c't are more exclusive in future with regards to the staff they employ. This guy was nothing but underhanded and stubborn.
-- Steve 'Hellcore' Hughes: Graphics + Concepts @ SmoothWall. http://www.smoothwall.org http://www.smoothwall.co.uk
Actually, the reviewer seems to have contacted the developer. Daniel said:
>"...nor did i see anything to suggest he had even asked us about these so called "problems"."
In the review, the reviewer actually states:
>"My concrete indications of security problems within SmoothWall found sheer disinterest with Richard Morrell, developer and project initiator. "That doesn't matter" was about the politest of all comments comment (sic)."
The reviewer apparently did attempt to have a dialogue with one of the developers, and was rebuffed (apparently impolitely.) I have had a similar experience with at least one SmoothWall developer behaving somewhat less than tactfully.
Tsstss.. Look at this excerpt from the article that this SmoothWall guy is complaining about:
I also have a strange feeling about other "security" options that they choose. For example: Not using shadowed password files. They say it wouldn't be neccessary since the only user available is root anyway. But what is the _sense_ of not using shadowed password files? (And what is the sense to require the user to be root to configure the system? Even Apache is supposed to be quite secure, but nobody will run it as root because there still might be holes. Impossible in a hacked-together firewall distribution?) The bytes in length on the harddisk they would have saved would be a joke.
All in all, I believe there are some truth- and insightful bits in the c't review, even if the reviewer did a mistake.
btw: To complain that the passwords had to be plaintext because PPPd and FreeSWAN required it is complete nonsense for a Firewall! Sources are available, so why not add a patch to have the passwords encrypted if this is supposed to become a Firewall?
(Sorry, had to emphasize this, since this is not some desktop distribution but supposed to be a Firewall.)
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
I have noticed that the founder of Smoothwall, Richard Morrell has some issues to deal with. He has a huge ego and does not like users that do not pay for his "open source software." He enjoys complaining about how much money he has spent on making CDs and giving them away for free and how people don't donate to him. I have a few quotes that I have collected that he has said on the mailing lists for smoothwall. "i have contacts with people at the kernel team that none of you have... i know people who can get this fixed and i'm on top of it... so stop complaining because you don't know what you're talking about" "i used to work for microsoft, i know how they work" (he worked in the sales dept selling licenses) "You're also not a paying customer - I'll email DIRECTLY my friend who WROTE the official driver. Friendships help. Thats why I'm richard@linux.com" "this is fuck all to do with SmoothWall its hardware level" Also, Mr. Morrell decided to turn it into closed source "enterprise version" that isn't free with extra features. So he's not allowing open source developers to add new features to the open source project because it will compete with his private closed source project.
First off reviewing a firewall like that is just whining by a non-techie. you want to review a firewall? crack it... Show me times it took and what kiddie tools took it down or circumvented it because of a flaw in the firewall. bitching about how the scripts are written is clutching at straws and trying to add content to an already empty review.
Why is it that we all will not listen to a SQL review without stats and figures but a firewall review get's any attention at all if it isnt even tested properly by the reviewer?
This review was like a review about ram and bitching about the color and shape.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
if a cgi script running as "nobody" is compromised, then it is possible that the user "nobody" can gain shell access as well. A shell is simply another executeable, just like the CGI script itself.
After trying several different Firewall products, I found smoothwall to be the easiest to setup and maintain. As far as the reviewers points, most are irrelavant, since the only access to the web interface and to SSH is from INSIDE your network. Unless you go out of your way to activate these things exterally, they're simply not seen to attackers. But then again, if you changed the way the product is shipped, then it's really working like it was intended anyway.
And how exactly would shadowing help against over-the-shoulder-lookers? Oh wait, I get it, you create a shadow over the keyboard so it can't be seen.... Better pray that there is no IR filter on that security camera.
I know... I know, don't feed... oh well.
karma capped
Okay, maybe I was a little hasty, but if someone gives you a bad review, and this was a bad review, you should just suck it up.. Imagine Microsoft sending out a press release everytime someone at /. gave them a bad review - they'd have to pay Taco to incorporate random-ms.pl
Join the Free Software Foundation
He actually stated that the only shell-access account on the box is root. This means that the only way you can get a command prompt is if you're logged in as root. Theoretically, if you can exploit a CGI bug, you could execute /bin/sh and have a shell, but they've probably disallowed that.
The Dachstein images from the LEAF Project are set up similarly. Root is the only shell access, CGI/Web runs from another user.
You thought that this sig was what you think that I thought you wanted me to think. I think.
As your momma always said: 'If you don't have anything good to say about someone, don't say it' or 'if you someone keeps "bothering" you, just stay away from them.' It's as simple as that.
So if you don't like Richard Morrell, head of the SmoothWall project, consider:
Personally, I'm sick of the "one-sided" reporting on Mr. Morrell. I've seen way too many people "complain" about him, but never comment on various personal details that are partially the cause of this -- let alone the daily on-slaught of Windows users who've barely heard of Linux, who don't bother reading the FAQ, let alone demand that SmoothWall automagically support every little, crappy-designed Windows application and their proprietary protocols that don't work well with firewalls anyway. After a week of being on the SmoothWall lists, I'd kill some very rude and ungrateful users well before Morrell. If you feel Morrell is "really bad for the project," then that's his problem, not yours!
Now if you still want something like SmoothWall without the SmoothWall(TM), take notice that others have forked the project into a new one called IPCop. Version 0.1.0 features SmoothWall 0.9.9, all the major post-0.9.9 patches and various enhancements. A final 0.1.1 release is to follow shortly before the team starts to work on version 0.2.0, an Linux 2.4/Netfilter implementation.
For all I care, you can think of IPCop as "SmoothWall without Morrell." Just don't say it outloud since many of us are all sick of hearing it!
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
Daniel Goscomb, one of the lead developers of Smoothwall, responds:
... reading on
...
...
/bin or /sbin directory that even remotely resembles a shell or mount program (ie do not use perl, use mod_perl, do not use php, use mod_php, etc)
... why take the chance ?
.htaccess files, and has no interaction with the CGI at all, other than when you change the passwords.
... wether or not he did I cannot verify, but if he quotes answers from you ("That doesn't matter"), he probably did contact you, and you certainly confirmed that comment with the above reply, I politely wonder about the next part of that sentence ( ... was about the politest of all comments comment.)
In our opinion this article is extremely badly researched and written. Furthermore it shows a lack of knowledge on the author's part.
sjah
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.
so you only have one layer of security ? The inability of any attacker to get a shell ? That's it ? I must admit I have not checked if you do that or not but
In my opinion you should at least take a number of these precautions
-> no shell access for nobody but root (of course this is enforced by putting a check in the main loop of bash, which mails "murder" if anybody tries differently)
-> all binaries --x--x--x, on a single partition which is the only one mounted without the "noexec" and with "ro" flag
-> *all* daemons chrooted, none have anything in their
-> *all* programs compiled from source
-> there is no such thing as an irrelevant permission
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.
plain text ? wrong permissions ? why would you take a chance ?
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.
again
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
user authentication is only irrelevant until a hacker gets by the first layer of security (which apparently on your system is the *only* layer of security)
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.
to quote the other article :
When a group of developers- more than ever one active in the spirit of GPL-want to successfully distribute a good product, they are usually interested in feedback, in order to improve their product. My concrete indications of security problems within SmoothWall found sheer disinterest with Richard Morrell, developer and project initiator. "That doesn't matter" was about the politest of all comments comment. Trust in the developer's competence and integrity is a basic pre-requisite for the usage of security relevant software. Morell has thoroughly destroyed mine."
this suggests he has contacted you
There's also a support community.
Some companies such as Pyramid are reselling Astaro with hardware and support.
-------
Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
I don't want to buy a product made for stopping criminals that is called "SmoothWall". This is like calling a Rottweiler "Sugar". Gimme a better name, like "Brickwall", "Barbed wire" or "Minefield.
Mikael
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
There's a difference between code released from a single source that has been audited, tested and integrated by the team, and code downloaded from tumtetum.tripod.com/haxx0rme/ and slapped in without thinking about it. I'm not suggesting that ALL homebrew patches are security holes in the making, but this is a security project, not an mp3 player.
neuro at well dot com (when I post, it's my opinions, no-one elses)
I've used Coyote Linux (http://www.coyotelinux.com) for about a year now, and it works great. It's a single floppy distro that runs on a dedicated 486 with 8 or meg of memory. It supports PPPoE and dial-on-demand (among other things), and is remotely manageable with ssh, if so desired. Just my $.02.
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
In most of these cases, c't is right. I think we can expect an exploit very soon... ;-)
Claus
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
Strange that we've yet to hear of an 0wned smoothie, outside of some theoretical situations, and some "i already have root because i installed the box" fiddlings.
If we see a posting on bugtraq or a properly documented break-in sent to us, we'll act on it.
neuro at well dot com (when I post, it's my opinions, no-one elses)
That does not matter because we don't know how to do it better and still want to sell our product you ignored the fact that the CGI interface is already password protected.
Claus
Sorry, this isn't how things work on Linux, nor many other modern operating systems. File space cannot be "allocated", then "read" in the manner described. You cannot allocate a file without writing to it, thus you cannot fish information from someone else's temp file like you describe. Maybe under DOS, but probably not on anything newer.
Whoever moderated this post as "Informative" needs to stick to moderating posts on which they are competent to judge, not just anything that sounds good but might be a line of complete BS.
What company? SmoothWall GPL, which is the version reviewed, is released under the GPL by a volunteer team of developers, testers and helpers.
neuro at well dot com (when I post, it's my opinions, no-one elses)
Twice this evening I've tried to get questions answered about their gpl'd smoothwall because my boss saw this slashdot article. And both times I've been nothing but insulted by Richard Morrell, the founder. The first time I was childish and incompetent all because I had the nickname 'nameless'. The second time I was k-lined from the server and he insults me because I have a german last name.
smoothwall.org.txt and smoothwall.org2.txt
Makes you wonder how these guys really act to customers.
Bill, a guest-class user who wants higher-level access for nerfarious purposes, creates a file in /tmp
If bill has access to the shell on a smoothwall system, he can do whatever he wants. No one disputes that shadow passwords are useful on multiuser systems, but this isn't one.
Are you speaking of me? Must be.
Anyway, I do not know the gentleman that posted that little piece. However, I do have a tendency to agree with him.
As for the spam. OK, if you see it that way.
Also, I never claimed that it was anything other than a fork. As a matter of fact it's plastered in every piece I write on my site. http://slydder.homelinux.com
I hate not being clear on matters.
As for having problems from SourceForge, I don't think so. But then again if we did it could only be because a certain person keeps on us to remove all mention of SmoothWall. hehe. What a character.
chuck
IT Admins Group: Where you decide the content
I wanted to use SmoothWall as my firewall, but I have a USR Sportster 128 ISDN card, and I can't figure out how to get it to work with smoothwall (or redhat, the documentation is sparse and tends to be in german).
Anyone know if Smoothwall will work with this card without alot of configuration effort?
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
Several months ago, I was messing around with Smoothwall as a possible simple solution to my home LAN situation. It was the eve of the 0.9.8 release, and I went on the Smoothwall IRC chat area and joked about getting an early copy of the release. Joked. I know that doesn't happen, and figured that with a technically oriented crowd, that I'd be understood as kidding. At the time, it seemed that I was. However.
A couple days later, after having installed Smoothwall and found it to be almost-but-not-quite-right, I popped on and asked a pretty simple question. Why wasn't there a copy of any compilation tools present, or any other services that someone on a small, personal network might like?
The response was pretty terse. "It's a firewall." Repeated inquiries resulted in various forms of the same answer. Now I understand that a firewall has one main purpose, but the -attitude- I got from the developers was really too much. I figured, after being booted from the channel, I'd email Richard and hope that a cooler, more corporate head might reside at the leadership of the Smoothwall project.
Unfortunately, I could -not- have been further from the truth. The situation escalated with Richard harassing me VIA email for several days, after repeated requests of mine not to email me any longer. He continued, his crude insults became -threats-, and it took three days for the matter to settle.
I am currently an assistant administrator at a small college using Linux as a gateway/NAS solution that's desperately in need of updating. Smoothwall might have once been a contender for this, but definitely not now.
I have posted a rather extensive website airing the entire situation with Richard, my own warts and all, at my Smoothwall site for the perusal of anyone interested. Sure, I might have made a mistake or two, but I don't feel anything I may have said justified what I recieved.
Anyone else have similar experiences?
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Being a geek *and* the firewall/vpn admin for a large network I was compelled by geekiness to set up a tunnel between the corporate network and my home network. The lack of desire to spend way too much money for an IPSec compliant appliance I opted to try numberous open source solutions, including Smoothwall 0.9.9se. Despite a few shortcomings, I found the "Smoothie" to be quite impressive. A 23 Meg ISO image yielded a bootable CD that installed without a hitch, identified all the hardware and prompted well for install input (reading the install docs is of course advisable). The box was online is just about 10 minutes with internal clients playing quake and surfing for porn. A quick, yet educated review of the default configurations and a nmap scan and I was confortable with the security... onto the VPN config: A straight forward, web based config menu has fields for all the usual Free-S/WAN VPN stuff, like gateway IP's, site network IP's, next-route-hop IPs, preshared secret, but lacked some specific config options that are needed to create a tunnel with a Checkpoint FW-1/VPN-1 gateway (the reason I was trying this product). Manually adding these config options to the ipsec.conf file was easy enough and in just a short while I was enjoying an IKE/3DES/MD5 tunnel into work.. well.. maybe "enjoying" isn't the right word. My next step was to add a few additional work subnets to the tunnel. This is done by creating an additional connection.. like a second tunnel with the same addresses and preshared secret.. piece of cake.. except, adding more info to the VPN configuration overwrites the ipsec.conf file with a newly created one. Doh!. Fortunately, the web interface is well written and it was pretty easy to add some code to make the admin script create the new ipsec.conf file with the Checkpoint specific changes. Total time invested for a fully functional, easily configurable firewall/VPN: just a few hours. Satisfaction level: 90% Summary: It's easy, fast and works as advertised. Pros: Fast install, Works with Static or dynamic IP's, Many other good features (check the website for details)., Easy to customize the code for personal gratification. Cons: it could offer more flexible IP chains config thru the web interface, Could use those additional VPN options for Checkpoint interoperability. I like it and the smoothwall folks can expect documentation of checkpoint compat. fixes along with a PayPal donation very soon.
chown -R us
Smoothwall GPL requires seperate hardware interfaces (modem/nic) per ip. The internal NIC can only view the splash page of smoothwall, and the external can't see it at all. By merely spoofing packets you cannot get to the internal ip.
But then you don't actually have an example of this spoofed packet that will fool smoothwall, do you?
Yes, smoothwall doesn't filter email. It's a conventional firewall. It's not a virus-checker. Compromised machines on the internal network can view the splash page of smoothwall. The splash page reveals the smoothwall version number and " 1:19pm up [REMOVED] days, [REMOVED], 0 users, load average: 0.38, 0.54, 0.57".
Anything more and you need http authentication. Show a theoretical exploit or calm down, please.
And probably still will. Here is my feedback on the issue relating to the Smoothwall review.
1: Plain text passwords as sufficient security on a single-user system. OK. THis is sufficient security because the only user is root and thus if you are on the system you have complete control over it. However, it is not optimal security, which is what you really want in a firewall. If the root user changes the password, you know this as soon as you try to log in again and can take action, but if they can read the password, they cannot always be detected easily. Therefore encrypted passwords are important on a firewall because they can allow more freedom to an intruder after the first intrusion. Therefore, encrypted passwords are still useful and should be implimented.
2: Protection of VPN keys is not exactly necessary either but it is good practice because it prevents someone from masquerading as your trusted server.
3: Protection of your PPP password is less of an issue IMO, though with the modern wave of DMCA complaints on the part of the MPAA, it would probably be good...
Therefore all the normal security rules for multi-user systems are beneficial for these dedicated firewalls, but for different reasons. For many people, the Smoothwall system as described is probably sufficient, but it si not for high-security environments.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
But if the permissions on the passwd file were setup so as to only be readable by root, it is effectively the same as having a shadowed passwords, which would require the user to already have root privilages read the actual hashes. It would be rather trivial to do since it's a single user system and its use is rather specific.
I'm not saying this is what the configuration on this device is, but the article doesn't really deny this either.
I have installed SmoothWall four times, for friends, on machines running the gambit from P100/12mb ram to P166/96mb ram, and using ethernet cards for DSL/Cable, it's a dream. That is, as long as the distro has drivers for your card (damn Tulips).
:-) and buying no fewer than four modems, I found one that should work. After another day or so of frustration, I contacted the helpful people at SmoothWall.org and I actually chatted with Mr. Morrell directly on their irc server. In five minutes, he'd set me straight and it was up and running. It was a CEBCAK (Computer Error Between Chair And Keyboard), naturally.
Then, for my parents who live in rural east Texas with a dialup connection, I had to figure out how to get an internal modem working in Linux. After reading the entire internet
For all the people bellyaching about how one guy represents the GPL developers, or doesn't use shadow passwords... whatever. At the end of the day, all that matters is getting the job done. And I recommend it to anyone who has a spare PC lying about, too.
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
You might be interested in what Mr Morrell has to say about IPcop...
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
It is fairly simple and easy to use. (If you are familiar with Unix).
Is it just me or does that qualifying statement completely negate the previous statement?
Of course it's "simple" and "easy to use" if you already know what you're doing.
Even though the Smoothwall developers argue that shadow passwords are not required, I think they are. I have a box running right here with it. Apache runs as the user "nobody", and therefore can read /etc/passwd. If shadow passwords were enabled, reading /etc/passwd would not matter.
.htaccess files.
By default, smoothwall does not allow access to the web interface from the outside, but, very frequently, people open that up to the world so they can get at it from anywhere (which is very easy to do through their menuing system). The box does not ask for a password until you actually get into the configuration screens, but cgi's that give you information are not protected by
I wanted to install it on a box that only had SCSI on it awhile back, but they ripped support out of the free version for SCSI. So I joined the irc channel and asked about it. They told me to wait until the commercial version was out and to buy that if I wanted scsi support. So I grabbed their *SDK* as they call it, and it had nothing useful in it at all. I joined back up to the irc channel to ask how to compile everything, they asked why, so I told them I was building in SCSI support so I could run it on the extra box that I had laying around. No one would talk to me after that.
I found a different machine to run it on, but the only reason I'm still running it is because I haven't had time to get something else. I used to recommend smoothwall to people, but not anymore. The developers I talked to were conceited jackass's. If they had helped me out, I probably would have even donated a few dollars to them.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
Really? I'm surprised. There are some applications where being able to allocate a big chunk of disk space for a buffer is important, and writing zeroes over it would slow things down. Are you sure there aren't any functions for doing so, hidden in the OS?
There are other reasons for keeping passwords in encrypted form as well, though such exploits are mostly limited to when people have physical access to the box. Not as likely, but still a good reason to routinely encrypt passwords.
You also assume that all the machines behind my firewall are windows boxes.
It only takes one compromised box on the inside to make an attack. Windows boxes happen to be particularly vulnerable because of Outlook's insane assumption that things attached to an email should be executed automatically.
That's not to say that boxes running other OSs aren't vulnerable. They are. Just some more than others. All boxes on the inside need to be protected, and it's not bad practice to anticipate the worst - that is, an attack from inside your network.
In a perfect environment, it'd never happen - but we all know the world is a less than perfect place. A good security policy takes this into account.
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...
Funny! True, but funny.
No question that Rodney or whatever his name is is a bit of a RudeBoy, but there's also no question that you fed the flames as eagerly as he returned them. Granted, he sounds like a bit of a dork, but he has that right, as do we all.
**>>BELCH
Please consider this:
- When I had my first experience with Unix, it was Solaris 7 / x86. I didn't learn
- squat from it because of that damn CDE shell -- I didn't know where to look for anything, and (with my windows-addled brain) I didn't understand where the equivalent of the 'control panel' was.
The moral of this story:Fast forward (slightly) to 1998. I now had a cable modem, and wanted to share it between several computers. I had learned about the differences between proxies and NAT, and tried several products that would run under Windows. All of those were commercial demos, with rather aggressive pricing. I was not impressed.
I had seen comments here about OpenBSD, so I looked into it. I took an old P-100, followed the directions, and had a working NAT firewall in a day. I had learned more about UNIX in about a week (this includes reading time) than I had in 4 months with Solaris!
Today, it's still there. The same hardware, at least -- it just got upgraded to OpenBSD 3.0
(Yes, I know -- that can be a big "if.")
On a side note, I installed OpenBSD 2.8 on a Thinkpad last year... it found the sound card, the peripherals (3com ethernet & US Robotics PCMCIA modem), and setting up XWindows was a piece of cake -- there were config files readily available. Perhaps not incredible, but it was easier than installing Windows on the same machine, and that is impressive!
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
..I think enough /.'ers are sufficiently interested in the idea of "turn key" open source security solutions to warrant discussion of the product.
Isn't that enough?
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Some of this post is very on-topic, but I include the rest for context. Moderators, please be kind.
I and a buddy recently completed a network installation for a small business. They had about 25 PC's in a 100-year-old wood-frame office building with asbetos everywhere and wanted these people to be able to utilize the Internet for such tasks as tracking packages via web sites, etc. They wanted to reduce costs by eliminating some 6 dialup accounts and free up phone lines for voice. They were less than a quarter mile from the local telco POP. So, they tried ADSL on one PC and consistently got about 1.5 Mbps down and about half that up. They loved it.
They asked me as an independent consultant what they should do to get the access to the other PC's. We looked at wiring the building, but due to the structural nightmare of the building, we decided that for their needs we could go with 802.11b. We dropped several CAT5e lines to three locations in the building: the computer room, where their mission-critical apps run on an AS400, and two access point mounts we set up.
We set up a SmoothWall box as their NAT since the evil ISP would only give us one static IP. It looked a lot better than FreeSCO. It was painless, absolutely painless to configure. But it had a shortcomming: it did not support PPPoE, which was necessary for the ADSL drop. Schucks! So we double-NATed using a little Linksys NAT/switch thingy to actually negotiate the PPP for us. We thought this would be nice because if someone were trying to hack in, they would have to circumvent 2 NAT's. We also thought it would have no significant impact on throughput. Big mistake (read on). Regardless, the NAT solution could remain in place should they ever want to add a stateful packet inspection firewall or something like that, or switch to better broadband, or even wire the building.
We spent almost an entire afternoon trying to configure the blasted access points. They were DLink 1000AP's. I followed DLink's instructions to the letter. I have a little beef with DLink about requiring a Windows machine to configure the things, but I can overlook that. I installed the configuration software on my laptop and was ready-to-rumble. The software failed repeatedly to detect the access point using a DLink branded 802.11b client device (USB DWL120). So I tried step two, isolating the AP's on an Ethernet segment. They failed detection again. So I fed the software MAC addresses manually. This failed. I was using only one machine with a known-to-work crossover patch cable. What the *(!@?
We eventually tried swtiching PC's, and then we noticed that the typeface DLink used to print the MAC addresses on their AP's made 5's look like 6's because the ink ran too much. I was really pissed. Upon getting the conf software to work on a desktop, I went back to my laptop to try again. It flat out wouldn't work with either of my 3Com CC10BT PCMCIA cards in different machines. Don't know why to this day; DLink couldn't help me on that one. But it did work on a desktop wit a 3Com 3c509b.
So, we got the access points set up and clients on all the PCs. We set up WEP encryption and tried to hack around a little to get in without the keys. We made sure we altered the default network ID and set good hard-to-guess passwords. It was like butta, for just one day.
Next weekend, we came back and hooked up more PC's. We went up to say 18 from 12. This is where we started having problems.
We used MAC address control on the APs as we promised the company we would. But after hours and hours of trial and error, we discovered that after adding more than 17 MAC addresses to the control list on one AP, the AP would spontaneously loose all of its configuration data. This worked this way on both AP's. DLink was not helpful. We would later RMA one of these and the replacement would do the same. So, we ended up having to have control lists that were local instead of network-wide. This defeated the roaming feature of 802.11b entirely (although nobody has a laptop there right now, I don't like it one bit). It also causes more difficulty in configuring the damn things. My friend, who is an Apple Campus Rep, haunts me to this day with suggestions of buying their AirPort brand equipment and says it would work better. Anyway, we choose DLink 'cause it was a hell of a lot cheaper than Orinoco.
We saved the company lotsa money on their dial-up. Next, we moved their web pages in house on a Red Hat box on a DMZ. DMZ wasn't all that in SmoothWall at the time (no hole poking), but it did what we needed it to. We moved their primary DNS to publicdns.org and set up MX records, the whole works. Set up a sendmail box. Set them up with PHPGroupWare. And, we encouraged them to make donations to the various projects which provided them with these fine products and services. I felt all warm and fuzzy. I had turned them into a free-software shop on commodity hardware and it all worked.
After a while, I started getting phone calls from them saying their web pages were only accessible to some clients. I looked into this. I left myself a way to get in (a port forwarded to a pc with sshd, I had permission to do this), and so I hopped on in and looked around. I became acutely aware that my ssh sessions were being dropped very frequently. I kept getting some sort of error from my ssh client during sessions.
We went back down to isolate the problem. We kept removing pieces of hardware from the network to figure out what the &*^% was going on, but found nothing. Then we learned SmoothWall had added support for PPPoE. We scrapped the Linksys, and we had no more dropped TCP sessions. It was freaky . I have seen the same problem affect two other people who used port forwarding since then with Linksys boxes (I help folks out on Mandrake Expert). SmoothWall had also added better DMZ support. I just have to say the system works beautifully.
Other issues we encountered in the project were users compromising security by using AOL clients. AOL clients create VPNs which in theory could allow hackers to circumvent your company's security. Don't let your users do this.
Oh, I almost forgot, the AS400. Up until we set them up with a network, they were using this shitty twinax serial network to talk to their AS400. It was expensive. It required shitty ISA adapters to be installed in every PC. It almost made me puke.
At the start of the project in our proposal we told them that they should use encrypt everything, even internally, and that that was just common sense. We told them they could put the AS400 on the LAN and use ssh instead of those card-and-twinax interfaces. I even verified this with my fiancee's dad, an old-AS400-fart himself, before I promised them this. WE WERE WRONG.
IBM told us they COULD NOT RUN SSHD WITHOUT BUYING A NEW MACHINE. That is such a load of crap, but we, having no experience with AS400's, could do nothing about it. The IBM man convinced them to run telnet. We told them we would take no responsibility for that. End-of-story.
Hope this has been an informative venting session for all of you. Please note that there was some relevant content in here, and that SmoothWall solved some of my problems, and I think it is a great product.
Yes, really.
Unix has a very useful construct known as "sparse files". Almost all Unix filesystems support them, though "non-native" filesystems (like FAT or ISO9660) do not. A sparse file appears to be just like any other file except for certain disk-block-sized "holes". The holes are not written to disk, do not count against disk free space or your disk quota, but in all other respects behave like regular disk blocks. If you read the file you get zeroes where the holes are. If you write to a hole it is "filled in" (of course, if you write less than a full block, the rest of the block is zeroed).
Thus you can have a 30-megabyte file on a 10-megabyte filesystem, where the 30-meg file really only has 8 megs of non-zero content and 22 megs of zero blocks that don't really exist. If you try to write to the whole file, of course, you'll run out of space.
Aside: this was the source of an interesting glitch with Samba. Windows Explorer copies files by creating the destination file the right size first, to make sure there's room for it, then filling it in (and not doing sufficient error checking on the latter part). The Samba developers had to "fix" Samba awhile back to make sure it created a non-sparse file in that situation.
Similar deal happens with memory. You might think allocating memory would give you access to all kinds of potentially juicy stuff left over from the last process to use that memory. You'd be wrong. The OS clears the memory before letting you use it. With many modern processors, it's possible to optimise this, using memory management tricks, so it doesn't cause the performance hit you might expect.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
Works very nice for me.
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.
Based on NetBSD, and it has been around for a while..
And there's plenty of others based on BSD freely available... see www.dubbele.com
-John
To the firewall at www.dubbele.com
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".
"Share the Net" is the first PC firewall/Inet sharing product I ever used. I have to give it a lot of credit for being there before almost all of the others. Back when it came out, it was worth the $70. I got several sales for its author because friends of mine were sharing their apartments/homes with roommates, and this product saved them from having to add extra phone lines so both them and their roommates could get online at the same time.
(Sure, sharing a 33.6K or 56K modem with 2 people sucked - but it was enough for IRC chat and checking email.)
In today's marketplace though, I think its age is showing. For starters, there's no reason to pay $70 for it, when better products are out there that are *free*! Second, SharetheNet hasn't been updated in quite a while, last I checked. It uses a pretty old Linux kernel version - and doesn't support a lot of features that have become standard in other firewall software products.
Boot times should not be a great concern with a firewall; you should only be booting it once a year or so anyway.
Once a year? Well, for those people who run firewalls on m$ products, once a week is more like it!
I work for a managed service provider and we run a bunch of firewalls for customers. Everything runs under Solaris on suitable Sun hardware, and even then I would like to see them re-booted 3 or 4 times a year.
Let's face it, UNIX rocks, but it does buffer lots of things in memory. One of my colleagues told me about a system he ran for two years without re-booting it, and when it finally was re-booted, it did not come up again. The occasional re-boot can't hurt it any. Besides, E250's and E450s boot in about a minute.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
So how much of the software that they used to make the prduct is GPL'd? Sounds like taking it proprietary is going to be a long road while they recreate all of the GPL's components - like the ones that they blame for insecure password storage, etc.
Almost all of the complaints I've ever seen lodged against Smoothwall were either accusations of the author being rude, a jerk, etc. - or accusations of GPL violations.
I think it's pretty clear that they haven't openly violated GPL. (They had a previous version where some wording needed a couple small changes to fully comply with GPL, but those changes were made before the latest release.)
As for the author, so what? The guy invested a lot of his time to give you a product that you can use for free. *That* is the bottom line. Is there a requirement anyplace that says you have to regularly report to Richard Morrell or interact with him directly in any way while you use Smoothwall? Not that I know of!
I joined the Smoothwall mailing list for quite a while, and what I saw was a flood of beginner questions that could have been answered by the user reading the instructions (or by actually installing the product before asking if it did or didn't have certain features!). If I was the author, I'd get angry with these people after a while too.
Have you ever had a truly good experience getting support on *any* IRC channel?
I can't begin to count all the rude and insulting people I've run into on plain old channels like #linux when I ask a question about something.
If I judged the quality of a product by that, I'd be 100% pro Microsoft by now!
You're right, after seeing the IRC logs some people have provided, I'm not going to bother with it.
fli4l looks like it might work, and its floppy based, which is nice, since the win98+winroute setup I'm using now wont' be disturbed.
What sucks is that the windows setup flawlessly detects and operates my Sportster 128 ISDN card without any intervention, but none of the linux-based stuff can even tell its in the machine.
The free smoothwall is good if you have one IP and a small LAN.
I've got 32 IP addresses and the need for a DMZ. I contacted the Smoothwall folks about this, and received a prompt and detailed response. I got another response a few days later with an organized product map and descriptions of the products. The prices aren't bad, and aside from the odd crabby person on the IRC channel, the experience has been pretty good so far.
I don't know one way or the other about the GPL violations... I just want a firewall product that's easy to deal with and *works* - ipchains/etc is too difficult for some clients to manage, but smoothwall isn't.