A Comparison of 802.11g Firewalls?

peoria kid asks: "Does anybody know how to compare the firewall effectiveness between the different providers of 802.11g networking solutions? I am considering purchasing a base station for my parents and I do not know if the Apple Airport base station or others such as Lynksys, or Lucent have better encryption and firewall protection."

Comments

None of these are actually firewalls

[DA-MAN]

It just happens to be a side effect of doing network address translation. Nothing comes in that isn't requested or related to connections made.

They also have a default DENY policy which means that they are all about as secure as the other. The only problem would be if they came out with a new teardrop-like exploit that crashes the tcp/ip stack of the little routers, and that wouldn't affect security internally and would probably be solved by a firmware update.

Because most are black boxes, you have to take whoever the manufacturers word for it that they have a solid tcp/ip stack that won't be susceptible to this sort of attack.

Main thing I would worry about is the speed, find out what wireless firewalls are rated as the fastest. Make sure WEP is enabled and you have Mac Address filtering. It's still not going to be nearly as secure as a cable.

If you want to be secure, get a software firewall as well (ZoneAlarm, Tiny Personal, Norton, etc.), run Spybot or Ad-Aware, run a Virus Scanner and keep your software up to date.

Bilkin'

[orthogonal]

Get a Belkin.

It'll securely interupt your parent's networking once every eight hours to show them an ad, ironically for "parental controls".

Three times a day, your parents will know someone cares about them. What more could they ask for from their son?