source: postlfs/security/firewalling/intro.xml@ 64d97b7c

<sect2 id="postlfs-security-fw-intro" xreflabel="Firewalling Introduction">
<title>Introduction to Firewalling</title>

<para>The general purpose of a firewall is to protect a network 
against malicious access by using a single machine as a firewall. 
This does imply that the firewall is to be considered a single point 
of failure, but it can make the administrators life a lot easier.</para>

<para>In a perfect world where you knew that every daemon or service 
on every machine was perfectly configured and was immune to, e.g., 
buffer-overflows and any other imaginable problem regarding its 
security, and where you trusted every user accessing your services 
to aim no harm, you wouldn't need to do firewalling!  
In the real world however, daemons may be misconfigured, 
exploits against essential services are freely available, you 
may wish to choose which services are accessible by certain machines, 
you may wish to limit which machines or applications are allowed 
to have internet access, or you may simply  not trust some of your 
apps or users.
In these situations you might  benefit by using a firewall.</para>

<para>Don't assume however, that having a firewall makes careful
configuration redundant, nor that it makes any negligent
misconfiguration harmless, nor that it prevents anyone from exploiting a
service you intentionally offer but haven't recently updated or patched
after an exploit went public.  Despite having a firewall, you need to
keep applications and daemons on your system well-configured and
up-to-date; a firewall is not a cure-all!</para>

</sect2>

<sect2>
<title>Meaning of the word firewall.</title>

<para>The word firewall can have several different meanings.</para>

<sect3><title><xref linkend="postlfs-security-fw-persFw"/></title>

<para>This is a setup or program, for Windows commercially sold by 
companies such as Symantec, of which they claim or pretend that it
secures a home or desktop-pc with internet access. This topic is 
highly relevant for users who do not know the ways their computers 
might be accessed via the internet and how to disable these, 
especially if they are always online and if they are connected via 
broadband links.</para></sect3>

<sect3><title><xref linkend="postlfs-security-fw-masqRouter"/></title>
<para>This is a box placed between the internet and an intranet. 
To minimize the risk of compromising the firewall itself it
should generally have only one role, that of protecting the intranet.
Although not completely riskless, the tasks of doing the routing 
and eventually IP masquerading<footnote><para>rewriting IP-headers 
of the packets it routes from clients with private IP-addresses onto 
the internet so that they seem to come from the firewall 
itself</para></footnote> are commonly considered harmless.</para></sect3>

<sect3><title><xref linkend="postlfs-security-fw-busybox"/></title>
<para>This is often an old box you may have retired and nearly forgotten, 
performing masquerading or routing functions, but offering a bunch of 
services, e.g., web-cache, mail, etc.  This may be very commonly used 
for home networks, but can definitely not to be considered as secure 
anymore because the combining of server and router on one machine raises 
the complexity of the setup.</para></sect3>

<sect3><title>Firewall with a demilitarized zone [not further described
here]</title>
<para>This box performs masquerading or routing, but grants public access to 
some branch of your network which, because of public IP's and a physically 
separated structure, is neither considered to be part of the inter- nor 
intranet.  These servers are those which must be easily accessible 
from both the inter- and intranet. The firewall protects 
them all.</para></sect3>

<sect3><title>Packetfilter / partly accessible net [partly described
here, see <xref linkend="postlfs-security-fw-busybox"/>]</title>
<para>Doing routing or masquerading, but permitting only selected 
services to be accessible, sometimes only by selected internal users or boxes; 
mostly used in highly secure business contexts, sometimes by distrusting 
employers.  This was the common configuration of a firewall at the time of 
the Linux 2.2 kernel.  It's still possible to configure a firewall this way, 
but it makes the rules quite complex and lengthy.</para></sect3>

</sect2>