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In computing, a firewall is a piece of hardware and/or software which functions in a networked environment to prevent some communications forbidden by the security policy, analogous to the function of firewalls in building construction. A firewall is also called a Border Protection Device (BPD), especially in NATO contexts, or packet filter in BSD contexts. A firewall has the basic task of controlling traffic between different zones of trust. Typical zones of trust include the Internet (a zone with no trust) and an internal network (a zone with high trust). The ultimate goal is to provide controlled connectivity between zones of differing trust levels through the enforcement of a security policy and connectivity model based on the least privilege principle.

Proper configuration of firewalls demands skill from the administrator. It requires considerable understanding of network protocols and of computer security. Small mistakes can render a firewall worthless as a security tool.

History of Firewalls

Firewall technology first began to emerge in the late 1980s. Internet was still a fairly new technology in terms of its global usage and connectivity. The original idea was formed in response to a number of major internet security breaches, which occurred in the late 1980s. In 1988 an employee at the NASA Ames Research Center in California sent a memo by email to his colleagues that read, "We are currently under attack from an Internet VIRUS! It has hit Berkeley, UC San Diego, Lawrence Livermore, Stanford, and NASA Ames." This virus known as the Morris Worm was carried by e-mail and is now a common nuisance for even the most ambiguous domestic user. The Morris Worm was the first large scale attack on Internet security, of which the online community neither expected, nor were prepared for. The internet community made it a top priority to combat any future attacks from happening and began to collaborate on new ideas, systems and software to make the internet safe again.

The first paper published on firewall technology was in 1988, when Jeff Mogul from Digital Equipment Corp. developed filter systems know as packet filter firewalls. This fairly basic system was the first generation of what would become a highly evolved and technical internet security feature. From 1980-1990 two colleagues from AT&T Bell Laboratories, Dave Presetto and Howard Trickey, developed the second generation of firewalls known as circuit level firewalls. Publications by Gene Spafford of Purdue University, Bill Cheswick at AT&T laboratories and Marcus Ranum described a third generation firewall known as application layer firewall. Marcus Ranum's work on the technology spearheaded the creation of the first commercial product. The product was released by Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) who named it the SEAL product. DEC’s first major sale was on June 13, 1991 to a chemical company based on the East-Coast of the USA.

At AT&T Bill Cheswick and Steve Bellovin were continuing their research in packet filtering and developed a working model for their own company based upon their original 1st generation architecture. In 1992, Bob Braden and Annette DeSchon at the University of Southern California were developing their own fourth generation packet filter firewall system. The product known as “Visas” was the first system to have a visual integration interface with colours and icons, which could be easily implemented to and accessed on a computer operating system such as Microsoft's Windows or Apple's Mac/OS. In 1994 a US company called “Check Point” built this in to readily available software.

The fifth and final generation of firewall was based on Kernel Proxy technology. This design is constantly evolving but its basic features and codes are currently in widespread use in both commercial and domestic computer systems. Cisco, one of the largest internet security companies in the world released the product to the public in 1997 and it remains one of the top sellers of internet firewall technology on the market.

Types of firewalls

There are three basic types of firewalls depending on:
  • Whether the communication is being done between a single node and the network, or between two or more networks.
  • Whether the communication is intercepted at the network layer, or at the application layer.
  • Whether the communication state is being tracked at the firewall or not.

With regard to the scope of filtered communications there exist:

  • Personal firewalls, a software application which normally filters traffic entering or leaving a single computer.
  • Network firewalls, normally running on a dedicated network device or computer positioned on the boundary of two or more networks or DMZs (demilitarized zones). Such a firewall filters all traffic entering or leaving the connected networks.

The latter definition corresponds to the conventional, traditional meaning of "firewall" in networking.

In reference to the layers where the traffic can be intercepted, three main categories of firewalls exist:

These network-layer and application-layer types of firewall may overlap, even though the personal firewall does not serve a network; indeed, single systems have implemented both together.

There's also the notion of application firewalls which are sometimes used during wide area network (WAN) networking on the world-wide web and govern the system software. An extended description would place them lower than application layer firewalls, indeed at the Operating System layer, and could alternately be called operating system firewalls. Some firewalls have higher privileges than others like mysql and pj.

Lastly, depending on whether the firewalls track packet states, two additional categories of firewalls exist:

Network layer firewalls

Main article: network layer firewall

Network layer firewalls operate at a (relatively) low level of the TCP/IP protocol stack as IP-packet filters, not allowing packets to pass through the firewall unless they match the rules. The firewall administrator may define the rules; or default built-in rules may apply (as in some inflexible firewall systems).

A more permissive setup could allow any packet to pass the filter as long as it does not match one or more "negative-rules", or "deny rules". Today network firewalls are built into most computer operating systems and network appliances.

Modern firewalls can filter traffic based on many packet attributes like source IP address, source port, destination IP address or port, destination service like WWW or FTP. They can filter based on protocols, TTL values, netblock of originator, domain name of the source, and many other attributes.

Application-layer firewalls

Main article: application layer firewall

''Application-layer firewalls work on the application level of the TCP/IP stack (i.e., all browser traffic, or all telnet or ftp traffic), and may intercept all packets traveling to or from an application. They block other packets (usually dropping them without acknowledgement to the sender). In principle, application firewalls can prevent all unwanted outside traffic from reaching protected machines.

By inspecting all packets for improper content, firewalls can even prevent the spread of the likes of viruses. In practice, however, this becomes so complex and so difficult to attempt (given the variety of applications and the diversity of content each may allow in its packet traffic) that comprehensive'' firewall design does not generally attempt this approach.

The XML firewall exemplifies a more recent kind of application-layer firewall.

Proxies

Main article: Proxy server

A proxy device (running either on dedicated hardware or as software on a general-purpose machine) may act as a firewall by responding to input packets (connection requests, for example) in the manner of an application, whilst blocking other packets.

Proxies make tampering with an internal system from the external network more difficult and misuse of one internal system would not necessarily cause a security breach exploitable from outside the firewall (as long as the application proxy remains intact and properly configured). Conversely, intruders may Hijack a publicly-reachable system and use it as a proxy for their own purposes; the proxy then masquerades as that system to other internal machines. While use of internal address spaces enhances security, crackers may still employ methods such as IP spoofing to attempt to pass packets to a target network..

Network address translation

Firewalls often have network address translation (NAT) functionality, and the hosts protected behind a firewall commonly use so-called "private address space", as defined in RFC 1918. Administrators often set up such scenarios in an effort (of debatable effectiveness) to disguise the internal address or network.

Management

The Middlebox Communication (midcom) Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force is working on standardizing protocols for managing firewalls and other middleboxes. See, e.g., Middlebox Communications (MIDCOM) Protocol Semantics.

Implementations

Use case scenario

The simplest form could be like this:

  • node 1 and node 2 running an OS with a Linux kernel (Debian GNU/Linux for example)

  • To create a redundancy firewall we could choose to build a high-availability cluster. Therefore we need to connect those nodes (at least two are necessary) to each another in a way they could "see" each other. The software to do so could be Heartbeat which is part of Linux-HA Project

  • The most critical task in such a scenario is to ensure that all nodes share the same data at all times, better known as data integrity. This could be done with DRBD which is roughly speaking nothing else than a network RAID 1.

  • Last but not least we need firewalling capabilities for the redundancy firewall. A packet filter like iptables helps here.

Online firewall check

These sites offer free online portscan services to check your firewall security. Please note that online port probes are not foolproof, as they always check the public IP address, which may be a proxy server. Online portscans are easy to use and offer basic insights, but to ensure network security, use tools like Nmap.

See also

External links

Computer network security | Network-related software | Packets

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Firewall (networking)".

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