Re: macnetworkprog digest, Vol 3 #511 - 13 msgs
Re: macnetworkprog digest, Vol 3 #511 - 13 msgs
- Subject: Re: macnetworkprog digest, Vol 3 #511 - 13 msgs
- From: Joshua Graessley <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2003 11:10:28 -0700
On Sep 2, 2003, at 11:59 PM, Ryan McGann wrote:
Yes, for the best security possible a customer needs to buy one of
(our) gateway products that includes IDS, firewall, spam filtering and
AntiVirus file scanning on inbound and outbound email in a hardware
box protected by several security measures including SmartCard and
password protection. But convincing Mac users to buy security products
is hard enough. Personal Firewalls are not meant to protect computer
labs or places where secure access to the terminal cannot be
guaranteed, but they work fine in a home environment.
I'm not suggesting that everyone should buy a firewall. My point is
that a personal firewall is worse than no firewall. Developers
constantly ask about how they can figure out if their product will work
when the personal firewall is enabled. This implies that a personal
firewall breaks legitimate products. It is not clear that any benefit
is derived from having a personal firewall.
It seems the right way to solve this problem is to use the
authorization framework and require authorization for operations such
as bind, connect, sendto, etc. Instead of filtering at the packet layer
on the local machine, which is fraught with problems, including no
feedback to applications, filter at the API layer. If a customer is
worried about traffic to and from their machine, a setting could be
modified to require authorization to open an outbound connection or
incoming connection. A user could choose to always allow certain
applications to perform these operations. The authorization framework
already has functionality for most of this. It wouldn't necessary
require typing a password, just the user accepting the applications
request to perform a network operation.
Applications wouldn't need to worry about whether or not they would
work. If the user didn't authenticate the process, the function could
return EPERM. We wouldn't have to come up with elaborate rules to try
and decide what traffic is okay and what traffic is malicious.
-josh
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