On Dec 14, 2009, at 11:47 PM, Joel Jaeggli wrote:
Owen DeLong wrote:
UPnP is a bad idea that (fortunately) doesn't apply to IPv6 anyway.
You don't need UPnP if you'r not doing NAT.
wishful thinking.
you're likely to still have a staeful firewall and in the consumer space someone is likely to want to punch holes in it.
Yes, SI will still be needed. However, UPnP is, at it's heart a way to allow arbitrary unauthenticated applications the power to amend your security policy to their will. Can you possibly explain any way in which such a thing is at all superior to no firewall at all?
I'm a consumer, I want to buy something, take it home, turn it on and have it work. I don't have an IT department. How the manufacturers solve that is their problem.
As a consumer my preferences for a security posture to the extent that I have one are:
don't hose me
don't make my life any more complicated than necessary
I would argue that a firewall that can be reconfigured by any applet a user clicks on (whether they know it or not) is actually less useful than no firewall because it creates the illusion in the users mind that there is a firewall protecting them.
Stable outgoing connections for p2p apps, messaging, gaming platforms and foo website with java script based rpc mechanisms have similar properties. I don't sleep soundly at night becasuse the $49 buffalo router I bought off an endcap at frys uses iptables, I sleep soundly because I don't care.
Precisely. And if you want to get picky, remember that "availability" is part of the standard definition of security. A firewall that doesn't let me play Chocolate-Sucking Zombie Monsters is an attack on the availability of that gmae, albeit from the purest of motives. No, I'm not saying that this is good. I am saying that in the real world, it *will* happen. --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb