On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 2:55 PM, Brian Johnson <bjohnson@drtel.com> wrote:
Eric,
If you read what he posted and really believe that is what he is saying, you need to re-think your career decision. It is obvious that he is not saying that.
Roland's saying basically: 1) if you deploy something on 'the internet' you should secure that something 2) the securing of that 'thing' should NOT be be placing a stateful device between your users and the 'thing'. In a simple case of: "Put a web server on the internet" Roland's advice breaks down to: 1) deploy server 2) put acl on upstream router like: permit tcp any any eq 80 deny ip any any 3) profit The router + acl will process line-rate traffic without care. -chris
I hate it when threads breakdown to this type of tripe and ridiculous restatement of untruths.
- Brian
-----Original Message----- From: Eric Wieling [mailto:EWieling@nyigc.com] Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2014 1:16 PM To: Dobbins, Roland; nanog@nanog.org Subject: RE: Requirements for IPv6 Firewalls
It seems to me you are saying we should get rid of firewalls and rely on applications network security.
This is so utterly idiotic I must be misunderstanding something. There are a few things we can count on in life, death, taxes, and application developers leaving giant security holes in their applications.
-----Original Message----- From: Dobbins, Roland [mailto:rdobbins@arbor.net] Sent: Saturday, April 19, 2014 12:10 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Requirements for IPv6 Firewalls
You can 'call' it all you like - but people who actually want to keep their servers up and running don't put stateful firewalls in front of them, because it's very easy to knock them over due to state exhaustion. In fact, it's far easier to knock them over than to knock over properly-tuned naked hosts.
Also, you might want to search the NANOG email archive on this topic. There's lots of previous discussion, which boils down to the fact that serious organizations running serious applications/services don't put stateful firewalls (or 'IPS', or NATs, et. al.) in front of their servers.
The only way to secure hosts/applications/service against compromise is via those hosts/applications/services themselves. Inserting stateful middleboxes doesn't actually accomplish anything to enhance confidentiality and integrity, actually increases the attack surface due to middlebox exploits (read the numerous security notices for various commercial and open-source stateful firewalls for compromise exploits), and has a negative impact on availability.