Reverse Firewalls As An Anti-Spam Tool

An anonymous reader writes "VeriSign's principal scientist Phillip Hallam-Baker believes one answer to stopping spammers and even crackers is by using reverse firewalls. He says reverse firewalls should be embedded in every cable modem and wireless access point for home users. "A traditional firewall is designed to stop attacks from the outside coming in; a reverse firewall stops an attack going out," Hallam-Baker said. Apparently, a reverse firewall would reduce the value of recruiting your home PC as a member of a botnet because "normal users have no need to send out floods of e-mail, which reverse firewalls can stop, but they do allow a normal flow of e-mail. ""

Comments

reverse firewall? what?

[rritterson]

Reverse Firewall? As far as I know, a wall of fire would be flaming on both sides.

All kidding aside, all capable firewalls do have outbound protection built into them. Consumer software firewalls monitor which programs are allowed to access the internet, for example, and enterprise-level firewalls allow you to define heuristics to block certain traffic patterns.

So, basically, the article is just suggesting a new name for an old concept. Really, the author wants consumer networking devices to have more capable firewalls.

He's missing something: home PCs aren't spam-generators, they are spam relays. The spam has to be getting in somehow, and that is something a normal firewall should be able to stop. On top of that, they have downloaded a trojan or been hit by a worm to turn them into relays in the first place, which is something a firewall + AV should prevent.

Also, it's probably just as easy to educate 75% of the people how not to become a spam relay as it is to get 75% of the people to buy something with a reverse firewall and then train them how to use it (most people I know just put their computers into the DMZ when they play games because they don't know how to forward ports).

Sure, layered security is a good thing, but I see this as likely to generate many headaches with not much benefit