Should You Fire Your Firewall?

Gsurface writes "A lengthy article over at Flexbeta.net focuses on firewall applications and how well they perform as far as securing your system. Four typical firewall applications were tested including two routers, one being the Cisco 831 SOHO, which performed rather well. In total, nine security test were conducted to measure how well each firewall performed."

Comments

I don't appreciate the hardware very much...

[MrNerdHair]

Very interesting, although I'ven never been much for hardware firewalls. I grab an old machine, load it up with Slackware 9.1, and custom-configure the netfilter/iptables rules. I's a lot more versitile, and it's not just a firewall. It can be expanded to run every server known to man, such as ssh for remote control, or FreeS/WAN, for VPN.

Re:I don't appreciate the hardware very much...

[nocomment]

Same here. Most of my company firewalls are running OpenBSD with PF. There's 1 linux box that is getting replaced very soon. Typical setup is 4 or 5 nics, multiple NAT's yadda yadda. plus now that OpenBSD is giong to have CARP in 3.5, you will have an auto-failover with a maintained state to another machine. This plus transparent squid caching, allows us to have about 100 users per T-1 with no complaints.

Re:I don't appreciate the hardware very much...

[Creepy Crawler]

Hardware firewalls are not meant for exquisite filtering or heavy duty VPN. What does make firewalls nice is that they have multiple ports (hence a router) and have a FULL bandwidth between any 2 channels.

With your example, once that nice PCI bus gets saturated... Game Over. Too bad they dont make a 1 GBps card for the AGP slot

Re:I don't appreciate the hardware very much...

[nocomment]

Hardware firewalls are not meant for exquisite filtering or heavy duty VPN. What does make firewalls nice is that they have multiple ports (hence a router) and have a FULL bandwidth between any 2 channels.

I agree with you, to a point. For a medium sized network like mine, where there are _no_ hubs except for the one at the firewall (so the snort box can listen) the switches will take care of keeping the bandwidth that the firewall actually hears to a minimum. The PCI bus can handle 127-ish MB/s nad 64 bit PCI can handle 508-ish. So unless you have a really high traffic system[1] this setup is not even noticable between a Cisco, or other heavy duty router.

[1] I have a really high traffic FTP server on my DMZ that is accessed a lot from systems on one of my NAT's and from the internet. What I did was move this system (OBSD) in _front_ of the firewall, enable PF on the FTP server to firewall it. Then I added a 2nd NIC to the FTP server so it plugs directly into the LAN. This makes sure that almost _no_ traffic from that system actaully hits the firewall. If I didn't do this, the PCI bus, like you say, would slow things to a crawl.

Crap

[Old Uncle Bill]

Any review of security/firewalls using Gibson's crappy analysis tools is beyond flawed. I would take all of this review with a grain or two of salt.

The Shields Up! Test

[Radical Rad]

The D-Link router failed to stealth one port whiles the bare system shows how vulnerable we can be without a firewall.

But the port it shows as closed is 113 which is sometimes needed to authenticate to ftp or web sites. The authors of the review are assuming that the best firewall stealths absolutely everything. But if a product completely protects your system why wouldn't that be good enough? Same for ZoneAlarm4 not stealthing several ports under Advanced Port Scanning.

I like the way they bring up outbound filtering though. Most "personal" firewalls don't do anything with this.

YRO?

[winsk]

Does this really belong in the Your Rights Online section?

TooLeaky test is BS

[VarmintCong]

I decided to try some of these tests myself. When testing using TooLeaky, I got a notification that it sent the information to GRC.com and recieved information from GRC.com, even when I disabled my internet connection.

Sounds like BS to me.

"An In-depth Look at SMALL SYSTEM Firewalls"

[Futurepower(R)]

This is just one more case where an excellent area of inquiry is ruined by the wording of a Slashdot article, and by people trying to show how much they know without saying anything that could actually be used by someone else.

The article at Flexbeta should not be worded, "An In-depth Look at Firewalls", it should be "An In-depth Look at Small System Firewalls". Most single computers or small LANs have no servers.

The parent post is considering an important issue for systems of 100 users. Systems that large are far out of the scope of the Flexbeta article.

We need two Slashdot articles on firewalls, one for small systems, and one for more complex LANS.

The Flexbeta article considered only Linksys (now owned by Cisco) and D-Link small system hardware firewalls. It did not consider Airlink Plus and Netgear.

I got burned with poor technical support from Cisco. Also, Cisco stopped supporting its 675 router. I don't want to be involved with Cisco again, so Linksys is out, especially because of the confused Linksys web site. Cisco has an enormous conflict of interest. If Linksys sells good firewalls, it will mean Cisco sells fewer.

So, which is the better hardware firewall, D-Link DI-604, or the Netgear RP614?