SmoothWall Firewall Review 495
Daniel Goscomb, one of the lead developers of Smoothwall, responds:
In our opinion this article is extremely badly researched and written. Furthermore it shows a lack of knowledge on the author's part.
The main concern he has is that of people being able to log in to the firewall and read configuration files. This point is irrelevant as there is only a single user that can access the shell, root. This also removes the need of shadow password files, if you have access to the machine to get the passwd file, you are already in as root anyhow.
Secondly he complains of plain text passwords for the ppp passwords. This is not our doing. The passwords are stored in this format as pppd requires them to be in plain text in the two files. He also mentions that the permissions of these files are wrong. If he looked a little more closely he would have seen that they are in fact symlinks to the 2 real files, which do have the proper permissions on them.
He also mentions the same "problem" with the shared keys system in FreeSWAN. Again, they are stored like this as FreeSWAN requires them in this format to read them.
As to the part about user authentification of the CGI scripts. This is completely irrelevant. There is no authentication in the CGI scripts. The authentication is done via .htaccess files, and has no interaction with the CGI at all, other than when you change the passwords.
I also find it disturbing that the author gave us no room for comment in his article, nor did i see anything to suggest he had even asked us about these so called "problems". We would have been happy to answer any questions he had.
Sincerely,
Daniel Goscomb.
Smoothwall is Great! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's secure, featurefull and easy to configure - what more could you want?
Re:Smoothwall is Great! (Score:4, Interesting)
Ultimately, though, this is a very interesting notation by Daniel:
>"...nor did i see anything to suggest he had even asked us about these so called "problems"."
In the review, the reviewer actually states:
>"My concrete indications of security problems within SmoothWall found sheer disinterest with Richard Morrell, developer and project initiator. "That doesn't matter" was about the politest of all comments comment (sic)."
The reviewer apparently did attempt to have a dialogue with one of the developers, and was rebuffed (apparently impolitely.) I have had a similar experience with at least one SmoothWall developer behaving somewhat less than tactfully.
If the reviewer is wrong about the security issues, the development team may feel justified in treating him thusly -- At the same time, I sincerely hope that the development team keeps a reasonably open ear in case a legitimate bug is discovered.
Re:Smoothwall is Great! (Score:2, Interesting)
If my, and many of my friend's, experiences of Richard Morrell are any indication, the reviewer got off lightly with "That doesn't matter". There's not even an expletive in there. I'm sure many other users here would back me up on this: Richard Morrell is like RMS but without the charm or patience. Smoothwall, however, is very good stuff. It runs excellently on a battered old 486 and is the ideal solution if you are looking to share a DSL/Cable connection, at any level from a simple home LAN to a hosted domain
Re:Smoothwall is Great! (Score:2)
Re:Smoothwall is Great! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Smoothwall is GREAT (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Smoothwall is GREAT (Score:3, Insightful)
If we see a posting on bugtraq or a properly documented break-in sent to us, we'll act on it.
sharethenet (Score:4, Offtopic)
Re:sharethenet (Score:2, Interesting)
True. I have a 486/33Mhz acting as a router for 5 computers, and at 250 kb/s download using cable-modem the cpu usage is around 15-20% only.
Using adsl and pppoe though used to get much worse performance, the cpu being used at 95-100% for 100kb/s download.
Re:sharethenet (Score:2, Interesting)
You go to BBIagent.net's page, and then proceed to answer a few questions about the machine you'll be using as the gateway (nic cards for WAN,LAN etc). Also, it has a built in proxy DNS and built in DHCP serving, so it can replace any firewall you have.
The only extra support I'd like to see is a dial-up option (I have a dial-up line I dial into to make sure the links are up etc, and would like to run it on this same box)... But, it has basic QOS, Port Forwarding, and access controls!
What more can you ask for than free?
Re:sharethenet (Score:3, Insightful)
And are hacked again in 15 minutes.
This is why computer forensics [honeynet.org] are important.
Re:sharethenet (Score:2, Interesting)
It's also why setting up a bootable CDROM is in many cases the way to go.
Keep your logfiles on the HD. Nothing else really needs to be there.
Of course, I don't do this. But I'm only protecting a few home computers. If I had an organization... I'd burn a CDR and boot firewalls from it. Just leave it in the drive. Good luck hacking that.
Re:sharethenet (Score:2)
Theoretically, the read-only mounted harddrive could be remounted as read/write. I admit that this would be hard.
But it's theoretically impossible with a CDROM, as the media just won't cooperate. ;)
Boot times should not be a great concern with a firewall; you should only be booting it once a year or so anyway.
Re:sharethenet (Score:2, Informative)
another free alternative... (Re:sharethenet) (Score:3, Informative)
Works very nice for me.
Response (Score:4, Informative)
our response [smoothwall.org]
Re:Response (Score:2, Interesting)
(not to be rude myself, but it's clear that the technical points the review makes aren't true, and it'd be nice if the social points were also disproved)
this really surprises me... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not the first time... (Score:4, Interesting)
In most of these cases, c't is right. I think we can expect an exploit very soon... ;-)
Smoothwall & GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
Now I'm happy for people to write GPL software if they like, and I'm happy for people to write commecial software if they like, but smoothwall seems to want to get the benifits of both.
They seem to want to get make free use of other peoples work through the GPL, but to feel free to only release parts of their software commercialy. I'm not claiming they are breaking the GPL or anything, but there seems something very unfair about their approach.
Also if you get the GPL edition, there are all kinds of requests on the web site that you donate money to them "SmoothWall developers have kids and families too, and it's all about giving back to the people who helped you.
". And yet I would guess that about 90% of what they are giving out was written by other people and they don't suggest they are going to give 90% of their donations to them.
Again, nothing wrong with that, I just don't much like it.
Basically I suggest that people look at their web site, and search the internet for comments about the creators of this software and how unhappy some people are with them before they go and use it.
Re:Smoothwall & GPL (Score:5, Interesting)
However the version I looked at (0.9.9) includes a java ssh terminal (MindTerm [appgate.org]) that is a commerial product that is "Free for non commerial personal use and may be included with other products so long as the different license is drawn attention to" to paraphrase this [appgate.org] license agreement. I saw no sign of this.
I am posting this anonymously and I haven't rasied this elsewhere as the attitude of the developers to these sorts of questions is well known and I don't really have the time for that.
How this applies to their commerial support offerings I'm not sure either.
Re:Smoothwall & GPL (Score:3, Interesting)
I went beyond that. I didn't just write GPL code as a hobby. I bet my family's well being on open source when I took a job with Sendmail, Inc. Unfortunately, Sendmail was forced into massive layoffs, and at the worst time economically. It took four months to find another tech job. It doesn't matter that I am good at what I do. There were a hundred other guys interviewing for the same job who were just as good or who wanted a lot less money.
Your precious GPL doesn't pay my rent or buy clothes for my daughter. If I had a choice between unemployment and Microsoft, then what the hell, "start me up".
Re:Smoothwall & GPL (Score:2)
Re:Smoothwall & GPL (Score:2)
Sendmail is GPL software? News to me. It looks an awful lot like a BSD license from where I'm sitting.
No, I'm not just being pedantic. There is a huge difference. And Sendmail, Inc. takes full advantage of the difference.
Re:Smoothwall & GPL (Score:3, Funny)
He's right, you need more sleep. It is self-destructive not to get enough sleep. You probably don't realize how crabby you have become.
Re: Unfair? How so? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's pretty clear that they haven't openly violated GPL. (They had a previous version where some wording needed a couple small changes to fully comply with GPL, but those changes were made before the latest release.)
As for the author, so what? The guy invested a lot of his time to give you a product that you can use for free. *That* is the bottom line. Is there a requirement anyplace that says you have to regularly report to Richard Morrell or interact with him directly in any way while you use Smoothwall? Not that I know of!
I joined the Smoothwall mailing list for quite a while, and what I saw was a flood of beginner questions that could have been answered by the user reading the instructions (or by actually installing the product before asking if it did or didn't have certain features!). If I was the author, I'd get angry with these people after a while too.
Re:Smoothwall & GPL (Score:2)
Re:Smoothwall & GPL (Score:2)
And in case my comments came over as too negative earlier, this *is* a good piece of software which is certainly worth of consideration if you have an old PC to use as a firewall.
Old debate...? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is true that internal security against logged in users can help defeat attackers who can only partially penetrate external defenses. If, for instance, you can only use a CGI bug to get ahold of the passwd file, you can leverage this with a dictionary attack if shadowing isn't installed. Provided you can disable the packet filter and attempt to login as root externally once you have the password... or even use an su type exploit from your original CGI bug. Either way, there are a lot of large corporations with bigger security holes than this.
However to claim that his review "shattered the illusion" of Smoothwall being a complete solution for home users is complete hyperbole. A home user who is trying to secure himself from internal attack from other logged in users in his house is probably pretty savvy in the first place and also has bigger problems. If the purpose of this product is have a CD you can ship to your parents to secure their DSL line against script Kiddiez and Hotmail's Traceroute function, then Smoothwall sounds to me like an outstanding effort.
c't': Two demerits.
Re:Old debate...? (Score:4, Informative)
From what I understand, even a user in your own house wouldn't be able to get at the password file, since only the root account (which one would assume is password protected) has access to a shell. This isn't a multiuser system that people log into.
(This is my understanding from what I've read - I've never used SmoothWall - please correct me if I'm mistaken).
Re:Old debate...? (Score:4, Insightful)
A false sense of security is worse than no security.
Even if no users other than root should ever be able to log in to the firewall, there is a reason to carefully set file permissions: Just like on a server, the services running should do so under their private username. That is to prevent a security related bug (aka vulnerability) from compromising the whole system. This is obviously less important on a router/firewall where services are only provided to the inside, but the attitude shown by the authors of Smoothwall certainly destroys my confidence in their general ability to provide a secure system.
Then there is the false discrimination between inside and outside: Especially when you deal with "non-techie" users you have to expect their systems to become infected by the latest worms and viruses. This opens the possibility of attacks from the inside which really are attacks from the outside. Granted, that is a remote possibility and if it happens, you have bigger problems than firewall file permissions, but it is still not understandable how an easy to fix thing like this is completely ignored. The german review makes it quite clear that the attitude of the firewall authors played a big part in the thumbs-down.
Re:Old debate...? (Score:2)
According to the response, the only files with "wrong"/"insecure" permissions are the sym-links. Granted, I'm the n00bs n00b in unix, but if your symlink points to something with different permissions, aren't the permissions of the ACTUAL file the ones used? If so, then the quoted "gripe" is a bit mute with regards to this product, wouldn't you say?
Re:Old debate...? (Score:2, Insightful)
From the review: The password for the DSL access was in plain text in an unprotected file.
The provider password is probably the most valuable information on the firewall, second only to full backdoor access. I have not yet verified that it is actually the secrets file itself which has the wrong permissions, but since c't has a reputation to lose, they wouldn't let an obvious misperception as mistaking a link for the file slip through.
There are many ways an attacker could gain inside access to the firewall. Most involve security vulnerabilities, others rely on uneducated users. Anyway, if the cgi-bins which are used to configure the firewall are not 100% secure, a buffer overflow in one of them could potentially be used to read any file which is accessible to the cgi-bins user. That's why file permissions do matter. Seeing how many people defend the "only root can log in anyway" statement, do you think they have really taken the necessary steps to avoid such a vulnerability by implementing several layers of security?
Now aren't you in deep shit already if an attacker can use your inside systems to connect to the firewall? Of course you are. But think about this: Anti-Virus tools will eventually detect backdoors on your user system(s), but not on the firewall. An undetected attacker can easily cause much more damage by actively destroying your data or just abusing your connection for his purposes over a long time. And who would suspect a backdoor on a rock-solid, completely secure firewall? That's why a false sense of security is worse than no security.
Re:Old debate...? (Score:2)
I couldn't agree more, and I don't think I was in any way picking on that specific detail.
I do a little programming myself, and I'm not so dumb that I think, that anything is completely secure. I don't know ANYONE who does. The kind of people, who think that something can be completely secure are probably 10% dumber than a plywood door placed in a hole in the ground, and as such wouldn't know a mouse from an accellerator, and they wouldn't be using a computer in the first place.
Re:Old debate...? (Score:3, Insightful)
In this day and age, the majority of network security incidents have some sort of internal connection. Implicitly trusting your internal users is suicidal in terms of network defense.
I think c't is right on with his assessment regarding things like file permissions, shadowed passwords, etc. In a security device, there is no excuse for not finishing the job - that is, securing your file permissions, using shadowed passwords, etc.
The SmoothWall people argue against the need for shadowed passwords as the only interactive user on the system is root. How about the CGIs that manage the applications? How about the possibility of exploiting some sort of weakness in one of them, resulting in the display of the encrypted passwords? Or are they so arrogant as to believe there couldn't possibly be any vulnerabilities in their code?
running CGI's as root ? great idea huh (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:running CGI's as root ? great idea huh (Score:2)
The Dachstein images from the LEAF Project are set up similarly. Root is the only shell access, CGI/Web runs from another user.
Re:running CGI's as root ? great idea huh (Score:2)
I'm not saying this is what the configuration on this device is, but the article doesn't really deny this either.
Re:running CGI's as root ? great idea huh (Score:2)
Re:running CGI's as root ? great idea huh (Score:2, Insightful)
Journalistic integrity? (Score:5, Interesting)
Reveiwers have to listen... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Reveiwers have to listen... (Score:3, Informative)
The second time he visited #smoothwall, he did not introduce himself as a journalist, nor did he say he was writing an article, and he proceeded to try and grill the channel members on the points he wrote about in the article. This is where some misunderstandings are appearing, as not everyone posting here about their IRC experience was online the first time Jürgen appeared.
Excuses (Score:4, Insightful)
Tsstss.. Look at this excerpt from the article that this SmoothWall guy is complaining about:
I also have a strange feeling about other "security" options that they choose. For example: Not using shadowed password files. They say it wouldn't be neccessary since the only user available is root anyway. But what is the _sense_ of not using shadowed password files? (And what is the sense to require the user to be root to configure the system? Even Apache is supposed to be quite secure, but nobody will run it as root because there still might be holes. Impossible in a hacked-together firewall distribution?) The bytes in length on the harddisk they would have saved would be a joke.
All in all, I believe there are some truth- and insightful bits in the c't review, even if the reviewer did a mistake.
btw: To complain that the passwords had to be plaintext because PPPd and FreeSWAN required it is complete nonsense for a Firewall! Sources are available, so why not add a patch to have the passwords encrypted if this is supposed to become a Firewall?
(Sorry, had to emphasize this, since this is not some desktop distribution but supposed to be a Firewall.)
Re:Excuses (Score:2)
In all fairness, this is referring to passwords that have to be sent to remote systems, so the cleartext has to be easily computable. Even if you encrypt the passwords, you still have to store an encryption key somewhere, in the end that's really just obscurity, not security. Very few "professional" firewalls even take that step, opting just to store remote passwords weakly masked (ie. Cisco's type 7 password hash, takes about 3 lines of code to recover the cleartext).
Re:Excuses (Score:2)
Short of special hardware with BIOS support, or a password that has to be manually typed in to boot the firewall (you'd better have a *good* UPS!); there's no known way to do that securely.
Re:Excuses (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's go even farther on this theme of bad choices.
You can logon directly to the root account remotely? You don't have to su first?
Ouch, but that's a major hole. That's like waving a Big Flag. Kiddies, look at this "firewall." Guess what account you should try?
Never allow remote logons to uid 0. Always at least force wheels to su.
There are CGIs available to manage the firewall? Oh, and they use port 81 to access it. How... creative. And it gets better. SSH is on port 222. Have you guys ever heard of port scanners? Custom ports is a way of flagging to intruders which firewall software is being used, except when the custom port pattern is unique.
I can go on. It has a built-in DHCP server. DHCP servers should never be mounted on external firewalls as their logfiles contain too much valuable information when the firewall's security is compromised.
Hmm, at least it has an HTTP proxy. Probably Squid. No SOCKS support though. And yes, it uses NAT. Gack.
Well anyway, maybe this c't review will convince a few people to give up a NAT-based solution. Sadly, they'll probably just go to another one.
Re:Excuses (Score:4, Interesting)
Mainly, NAT can be persuaded to become bidirectional with relative ease. That is, you can trick it into giving access to machines behind the firewall. This is especially easy if there are servers behind the firewall.
The explanation on how is technical in the extreme, and while I mostly understand it, I don't trust myself to explain it correctly; I'll recommend the Zwicky book again, [amazon.com] perhaps I should put it in my sigfile. :) If you're broke, go find your local university's library. Any decent uni library and many crappy ones will have at least the first edition of Zwicky.
The simple answer, though: SOCKS4/5 is a server, and NAT is a router solution. Routers route packets around the 'net. They are designed to pass them back and forth. Servers, on the other hand, just receive packets, process them, and decide what to do with them.
I talked about this a bit more in a BSD thread just earlier today: go here [slashdot.org] to see my other comment.
Now, don't get me wrong; NAT is much better than just having an open connection. But it will usually pass ICMP packets, and that's an enormous security hole. Dumb network admins usually deal with it by blocking all ICMP packets, which of course breaks a whole pile of things. The better solution is to just not ever route packets from the 'net past the firewall. They should all be caught at the firewall and fed through some kind of proxy before they ever touch the inside. That can only be done if you give up NAT.
Re:Excuses (Score:2)
That's for your local system. The issue under discussion is PPP - which is a protocol with a remote system. Some revisions of the protocol, unfortunately, require that you send a password in cleartext. That password has to be stored somewhere - or, presumably, you could have the user type it in when he boots the firewall ... but that's rather inconvenient.
Until you can force all ISPs to migrate to schemes that don't require cleartext passwords (MS-CHAP, for example) you can't fix this one.
Attitude Problems with Smoothwall Developers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Attitude Problems with Smoothwall Developers (Score:3, Informative)
Re: Attitude Problems with Smoothwall Developers (Score:5, Informative)
for me it was a straightforward switch from smoothwall to ipcop. easiest install of any operating system i've ever seen. ipcop supports ext3 (for no extra cost!) which is great for unplanned reboots.
Re:Attitude Problems with Smoothwall Developers (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, it's free, it's GPLed. Big deal. There are plenty of free, GPLed firewalls out there, and the developers of them are probably a lot nicer. What sets Smoothwall above the rest? Tech support? Reading
Gawyn
Not a real firewall review (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is it that we all will not listen to a SQL review without stats and figures but a firewall review get's any attention at all if it isnt even tested properly by the reviewer?
This review was like a review about ram and bitching about the color and shape.
Smoothwall (Score:2, Informative)
Re:you assume complete security from the inside (Score:2)
It only takes one compromised box on the inside to make an attack. Windows boxes happen to be particularly vulnerable because of Outlook's insane assumption that things attached to an email should be executed automatically.
That's not to say that boxes running other OSs aren't vulnerable. They are. Just some more than others. All boxes on the inside need to be protected, and it's not bad practice to anticipate the worst - that is, an attack from inside your network.
In a perfect environment, it'd never happen - but we all know the world is a less than perfect place. A good security policy takes this into account.
No more comments on Morrell, please! Try IPCop! (Score:5, Informative)
As your momma always said: 'If you don't have anything good to say about someone, don't say it' or 'if you someone keeps "bothering" you, just stay away from them.' It's as simple as that.
So if you don't like Richard Morrell, head of the SmoothWall project, consider:
Personally, I'm sick of the "one-sided" reporting on Mr. Morrell. I've seen way too many people "complain" about him, but never comment on various personal details that are partially the cause of this -- let alone the daily on-slaught of Windows users who've barely heard of Linux, who don't bother reading the FAQ, let alone demand that SmoothWall automagically support every little, crappy-designed Windows application and their proprietary protocols that don't work well with firewalls anyway. After a week of being on the SmoothWall lists, I'd kill some very rude and ungrateful users well before Morrell. If you feel Morrell is "really bad for the project," then that's his problem, not yours!
Now if you still want something like SmoothWall without the SmoothWall(TM), take notice that others have forked the project into a new one called IPCop [ipcop.org]. Version 0.1.0 features SmoothWall 0.9.9, all the major post-0.9.9 patches and various enhancements. A final 0.1.1 release is to follow shortly before the team starts to work on version 0.2.0, an Linux 2.4/Netfilter implementation.
For all I care, you can think of IPCop as "SmoothWall without Morrell." Just don't say it outloud since many of us are all sick of hearing it!
Re:No more comments on Morrell, please! Try IPCop! (Score:3, Interesting)
You might be interested in what Mr Morrell has to say about IPcop...
Re:No more comments on Morrell, please! Try IPCop! (Score:2, Informative)
Anyway, I do not know the gentleman that posted that little piece. However, I do have a tendency to agree with him.
As for the spam. OK, if you see it that way.
Also, I never claimed that it was anything other than a fork. As a matter of fact it's plastered in every piece I write on my site. http://slydder.homelinux.com
I hate not being clear on matters.
As for having problems from SourceForge, I don't think so. But then again if we did it could only be because a certain person keeps on us to remove all mention of SmoothWall. hehe. What a character.
chuck
Replying to the reply (Score:4, Insightful)
In our opinion this article is extremely badly researched and written. Furthermore it shows a lack of knowledge on the author's part.
sjah
The main concern he has is that of people being able to log in to the firewall and read configuration files. This point is irrelevant as there is only a single user that can access the shell, root. This also removes the need of shadow password files, if you have access to the machine to get the passwd file, you are already in as root anyhow.
so you only have one layer of security ? The inability of any attacker to get a shell ? That's it ? I must admit I have not checked if you do that or not but
In my opinion you should at least take a number of these precautions
-> no shell access for nobody but root (of course this is enforced by putting a check in the main loop of bash, which mails "murder" if anybody tries differently)
-> all binaries --x--x--x, on a single partition which is the only one mounted without the "noexec" and with "ro" flag
-> *all* daemons chrooted, none have anything in their
-> *all* programs compiled from source
-> there is no such thing as an irrelevant permission
Secondly he complains of plain text passwords for the ppp passwords. This is not our doing. The passwords are stored in this format as pppd requires them to be in plain text in the two files. He also mentions that the permissions of these files are wrong. If he looked a little more closely he would have seen that they are in fact symlinks to the 2 real files, which do have the proper permissions on them.
plain text ? wrong permissions ? why would you take a chance ?
He also mentions the same "problem" with the shared keys system in FreeSWAN. Again, they are stored like this as FreeSWAN requires them in this format to read them.
again
As to the part about user authentification of the CGI scripts. This is completely irrelevant. There is no authentication in the CGI scripts. The authentication is done via
user authentication is only irrelevant until a hacker gets by the first layer of security (which apparently on your system is the *only* layer of security)
I also find it disturbing that the author gave us no room for comment in his article, nor did i see anything to suggest he had even asked us about these so called "problems". We would have been happy to answer any questions he had.
to quote the other article :
When a group of developers- more than ever one active in the spirit of GPL-want to successfully distribute a good product, they are usually interested in feedback, in order to improve their product. My concrete indications of security problems within SmoothWall found sheer disinterest with Richard Morrell, developer and project initiator. "That doesn't matter" was about the politest of all comments comment. Trust in the developer's competence and integrity is a basic pre-requisite for the usage of security relevant software. Morell has thoroughly destroyed mine."
this suggests he has contacted you
Another firewall product: Astaro (Score:3, Informative)
There's also a support community [astaro.org].
Some companies such as Pyramid [pyramid.de] are reselling [astaro.com] Astaro with hardware and support.
The name?!?! (Score:2, Funny)
Mikael
Another alternative (Score:3, Informative)
Try OpenBSD for a firewall with minimal hardware. (Score:5, Insightful)
You can find all kinds of examples of how to set one up like here. [onlamp.com]
Older distro's used IPF, but as of 3.0 they use pf. You can read about pf here. [openbsd.org]
OpenBSD has gone 4 years without a remote hole in the default install. Pretty impressive.
But hey, only use it if you are SERIOUS about security AND don't want to pay anything.
Although you should consider helping fund the project out of the kindness of you
Re:Try OpenBSD for a firewall with minimal hardwar (Score:3, Funny)
Is it just me or does that qualifying statement completely negate the previous statement?
Of course it's "simple" and "easy to use" if you already know what you're doing.
OpenBSD usability (Score:2)
Please consider this:
- When I had my first experience with Unix, it was Solaris 7 / x86. I didn't learn
- squat from it because of that damn CDE shell -- I didn't know where to look for anything, and (with my windows-addled brain) I didn't understand where the equivalent of the 'control panel' was.
The moral of this story:Fast forward (slightly) to 1998. I now had a cable modem, and wanted to share it between several computers. I had learned about the differences between proxies and NAT, and tried several products that would run under Windows. All of those were commercial demos, with rather aggressive pricing. I was not impressed.
I had seen comments here about OpenBSD, so I looked into it. I took an old P-100, followed the directions, and had a working NAT firewall in a day. I had learned more about UNIX in about a week (this includes reading time) than I had in 4 months with Solaris!
Today, it's still there. The same hardware, at least -- it just got upgraded to OpenBSD 3.0
(Yes, I know -- that can be a big "if.")
On a side note, I installed OpenBSD 2.8 on a Thinkpad last year... it found the sound card, the peripherals (3com ethernet & US Robotics PCMCIA modem), and setting up XWindows was a piece of cake -- there were config files readily available. Perhaps not incredible, but it was easier than installing Windows on the same machine, and that is impressive!
BSD Based firewalls (Score:3, Interesting)
-John
My smoothwall experiance (it was bad) (Score:5, Interesting)
smoothwall.org.txt [widomaker.com] and smoothwall.org2.txt [widomaker.com]
Makes you wonder how these guys really act to customers.
Re:My smoothwall experiance (it was bad) (Score:2, Interesting)
Consider: if I donated money or purchased the product outright, project members might begin treating me with respect and patience -- but that respect and patience would have been purchased, rather than genuine. I assume that the boorish behavior would have continued behind my back. Equally possible is the chance that the boorish behavior would have continued to my face.
Ultimately, it was this thought that led to me voiding a donation check I had written to the project. I voided the check two days after installing SmoothWall, a few hours after writing the check, and half an hour after being insulted by Richard Morrell on the users mailing list.
Re:My smoothwall experiance (it was bad) (Score:2, Insightful)
Please don't misunderstand me: I understand it requires a lot of time, money and effort to bring SmoothWall into existance; the work is appreciated. SmoothWall is a valuable addition to the free software world. It is frustrating dealing with people who won't read docs. But there is no reason to be belligerant. Morrell does his work and his SmoothWall finances no favors by being rude.
point your boss (Score:3, Informative)
Re:My smoothwall experiance (it was bad) (Score:3, Insightful)
It didn't apper tobe the case so I joined the irc chan and asked about the problem I had had, result: kickban
I was actually going to offer to write the pnp stuff I had done properly and then submit it to them, not any more thank you :)
SmoothWall and ISDN? (Score:2)
Anyone know if Smoothwall will work with this card without alot of configuration effort?
Security = Probability (Score:5, Insightful)
Every part of the system has a (hopefully low) propability to be successfully hacked. The more barriers you have, the securer your system is.
It's also worth nothing that the only interactive account is root. There are daemons running under different user ids (I assume in favor of the SW team). As with every remote exploit, these daemons are the entry gates. Also note that remote exploits by definition don't relate to any interactive accounts!
Now, if one service has been hacked, the whole system is already compromised because there are no shadow passwords, files have the wrong permissions, etc.
You can argue about the passwort files for remote connections. You can't argue about not using shadow passwords, that's just plain stupid.
It's like leaving your safe unlocked because there is already the locked front door...
Re:Security = Probability (Score:2)
Yup. The situation is worse if you have multiple machines.
If I can hack a service on one firewall, and it doesn't have shadow passwords, then I'll eventually figure out the root password.
This has two serious implications:
1. I can now log in as root, and erase any previous evidence of a breakin. This'll make detection of a breakin much more difficult.
2. If any other firewalls/routers/etc. on the site have the same root password, I now have full access to those machines too.
In an ideal world, every machine and router would have a separate, strong password. And those passwords are changed every 3 months. And none of the admins ever forgets them or writes them down.
Unfortunately, no one I know does this. It's just too hard and cumbersome. So you end up with one password for each class of machines.
Kinda makes you wish everyone used Blowfish for encrypting the passwords, doesn't it? Viva OpenBSD!
My Experience with Smoothwall's Richard (Score:5, Interesting)
A couple days later, after having installed Smoothwall and found it to be almost-but-not-quite-right, I popped on and asked a pretty simple question. Why wasn't there a copy of any compilation tools present, or any other services that someone on a small, personal network might like?
The response was pretty terse. "It's a firewall." Repeated inquiries resulted in various forms of the same answer. Now I understand that a firewall has one main purpose, but the -attitude- I got from the developers was really too much. I figured, after being booted from the channel, I'd email Richard and hope that a cooler, more corporate head might reside at the leadership of the Smoothwall project.
Unfortunately, I could -not- have been further from the truth. The situation escalated with Richard harassing me VIA email for several days, after repeated requests of mine not to email me any longer. He continued, his crude insults became -threats-, and it took three days for the matter to settle.
I am currently an assistant administrator at a small college using Linux as a gateway/NAS solution that's desperately in need of updating. Smoothwall might have once been a contender for this, but definitely not now.
I have posted a rather extensive website airing the entire situation with Richard, my own warts and all, at my Smoothwall site [wctc.org] for the perusal of anyone interested. Sure, I might have made a mistake or two, but I don't feel anything I may have said justified what I recieved.
Anyone else have similar experiences?
Re:My Experience with Smoothwall's Richard (Score:2)
The response was pretty terse. "It's a firewall."
And that was the answer.. so why take it any further?
I was considering setting up smoothwall for a friend, because they aren't Unix savvy and I liked the idea of it's web control panels (seemed a little better than freesco's). However, this person would be doing it with their existing hardware, and they had a winmodem. So I wandered into the IRC channel and asked whether smoothwall had any support for winmodems.
The answer was one you'd probably consider to be terse: "No." But it told me what I wanted to know.. I mean honestly, what did you want, an essay?
I really don't understand what you were trying to achieve by "Repeated inquiries." And I suspect the developer's attitude was "we've heard this thousands of times before, he's said it about 40 times so far tonight, we keep giving him the answer and he won't shut up!"
Re:My Experience with Smoothwall's Richard (Score:2)
Given that Smoothwall's NAT features are at best, rudimentary (No port forwarding by range, no statically assigned IP addresses as of version 0.9.9) it seemed rather logical to want to be able to add in features myself, at my own rick, that would provide these functions. But without a C compiler, it's just easier to go with someone else.
Re:My Experience with Smoothwall's Richard (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:My Experience with Smoothwall's Richard (Score:2, Interesting)
I was reading this article's comments with just cursory interest until I came across this post. I headed to your website and read the whole exchange.
Frankly, I think you are totally in the right here. The IRC exchange was typical, from what I've seen, for IRC. You even provided help to other customers of the company. I was absolutely astounded to read the reply(ies) you received to the email you sent the 'president' of this company. I cannot believe that anyone in charge of a company (or any company public or private) providing a product could be so daft. After reading through the other comments, I can also see this is not an isolated incident.
Well, one thing is for sure: this could be the most secure firewall ever , but after reading this and other exchanges with the people who make it, I'm not even going to bother trying it.
I AM SMOOTHWALL - I OWN SMOOTHWALL (Score:2)
No question that Rodney or whatever his name is is a bit of a RudeBoy, but there's also no question that you fed the flames as eagerly as he returned them. Granted, he sounds like a bit of a dork, but he has that right, as do we all.
Re:My Experience with Smoothwall's Richard (Score:2)
Is this appropriate behaviour for someone in security? By no means. I made no threats other than disclosure. Richard threatened to, and attempted to, have me silenced by false accusations.
As I stated on my site, not a single person at Smoothwall responded to the harassment issue. But I see the truth hurts.
Re:My Experience with Smoothwall's Richard (Score:2)
Re:My Experience with Smoothwall's Richard (Score:2, Interesting)
I find him to be arrogant, overbearing, thoughtless, anal, and childish.
Okay, -almost- entirely unlike you. But then, you are not making threats and false accusations of illegal acts against a person who has offered you neither insult nor any offense whatsoever. You aren't trying to abuse the law and the trust of a corporation to attack an innocent man. And you aren't posting pointless, silly, ad hominem slander.
Oh, wait. You are posting pointless, silly, ad hominem slander.
I guess you're not that different after all.
My own damned reveiw.... (dammit!) (Score:4, Interesting)
Morrell was helpful to me. (Score:2)
Then, for my parents who live in rural east Texas with a dialup connection, I had to figure out how to get an internal modem working in Linux. After reading the entire internet
For all the people bellyaching about how one guy represents the GPL developers, or doesn't use shadow passwords... whatever. At the end of the day, all that matters is getting the job done. And I recommend it to anyone who has a spare PC lying about, too.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
The unfortunate failure of a great idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
Upon joining the channel, I was bombarded with the omnipresent topic, "Welcome to #smoothwall
support if you haven't donated. http://redirect.smoothwall.org/donate"
Ignoring the blatantly anti-open-source sentiment, I proceeded to ask about features and functionality that I feel are paramount to implementation of a device designed to secure my entire network. Before anyone so much as regarded my first question, I was bombarded with "Have you paid yet?" A simple 'not yet' got me my first response: "Can't you read the f**king topc?!"
Of course, I wasn't looking for support -- simply answers to questions about the products capabilities. Off to a great start.
In the end, my questions were answered, privately, by MacGyver, whose answers unfortunaely indicated that features I think are critical in a firewall are only available in the commercial version. To suggest a few:
- No support for multiple IP's on the external interface
- No ability to write filter rules for outbound traffic
- No inherent ability to manage IDS policies used by Snort
- No immediate planned support for a stateful kernel
etc...
Granted, I could accomplish all of these tasks through custom modifications to the product -- but that would defeat the purpose of the product in the first place -- to create a secure filtering firewall that can be easily and securely managed through an integrated portable interface without the need for extensive customization.
To comment on the article posted this evening, I think that despite the article author's process for review or lack thereof, SmoothWall's response was unacceptable. To say that passwords are not shadowed because the box has but the root user would be to say that Bind and Sendmail need not be firewalled because their latest revisions have no vulnerabilities...
yet.
To say that the open-source security packages that comprise the firewall _require_ clear-text passwords is to insult the intelligence of everyone here who knows better or has found more secure alternatives to the same problems in the past. The open-source community is not ignorant, nor are we fooled by any comapny's efforts to conceal laziness.
Security is an unknown. We place our confidence in hybrid hardware and software solutions that provide protection from the exploits we've identified already, but we expect that new vulnerabilities are inevitable. We cannot neglect commonly accepted security practices because our products have not yet been broken. The correlary would be to argue against home alarms because we already have a lock on the door.
A single layer of security is never enough. ESPECIALLY for a firewall. If this were to be an end-user distribution sitting _behind_ a firewall, the lack of external access would _probably_ be enough. However, as a firewall, such neglect for security practices that have a negligible effect on performance but provide such a significant measure of protection is both arrogant and ignorant at the same time.
In conclusion, neither the product's lackluster featureset, nor it's father company's poor customer support practices would have individually discouraged my using it.
Couple those with questionable security practices, though, and I can assure you that SmoothWall will never be enough to protect _my_ network...
Saga of a Network Installation with SmoothWall (Score:5, Interesting)
I and a buddy recently completed a network installation for a small business. They had about 25 PC's in a 100-year-old wood-frame office building with asbetos everywhere and wanted these people to be able to utilize the Internet for such tasks as tracking packages via web sites, etc. They wanted to reduce costs by eliminating some 6 dialup accounts and free up phone lines for voice. They were less than a quarter mile from the local telco POP. So, they tried ADSL on one PC and consistently got about 1.5 Mbps down and about half that up. They loved it.
They asked me as an independent consultant what they should do to get the access to the other PC's. We looked at wiring the building, but due to the structural nightmare of the building, we decided that for their needs we could go with 802.11b. We dropped several CAT5e lines to three locations in the building: the computer room, where their mission-critical apps run on an AS400, and two access point mounts we set up.
We set up a SmoothWall box as their NAT since the evil ISP would only give us one static IP. It looked a lot better than FreeSCO. It was painless, absolutely painless to configure. But it had a shortcomming: it did not support PPPoE, which was necessary for the ADSL drop. Schucks! So we double-NATed using a little Linksys NAT/switch thingy to actually negotiate the PPP for us. We thought this would be nice because if someone were trying to hack in, they would have to circumvent 2 NAT's. We also thought it would have no significant impact on throughput. Big mistake (read on). Regardless, the NAT solution could remain in place should they ever want to add a stateful packet inspection firewall or something like that, or switch to better broadband, or even wire the building.
We spent almost an entire afternoon trying to configure the blasted access points. They were DLink 1000AP's. I followed DLink's instructions to the letter. I have a little beef with DLink about requiring a Windows machine to configure the things, but I can overlook that. I installed the configuration software on my laptop and was ready-to-rumble. The software failed repeatedly to detect the access point using a DLink branded 802.11b client device (USB DWL120). So I tried step two, isolating the AP's on an Ethernet segment. They failed detection again. So I fed the software MAC addresses manually. This failed. I was using only one machine with a known-to-work crossover patch cable. What the *(!@?
We eventually tried swtiching PC's, and then we noticed that the typeface DLink used to print the MAC addresses on their AP's made 5's look like 6's because the ink ran too much. I was really pissed. Upon getting the conf software to work on a desktop, I went back to my laptop to try again. It flat out wouldn't work with either of my 3Com CC10BT PCMCIA cards in different machines. Don't know why to this day; DLink couldn't help me on that one. But it did work on a desktop wit a 3Com 3c509b.
So, we got the access points set up and clients on all the PCs. We set up WEP encryption and tried to hack around a little to get in without the keys. We made sure we altered the default network ID and set good hard-to-guess passwords. It was like butta, for just one day.
Next weekend, we came back and hooked up more PC's. We went up to say 18 from 12. This is where we started having problems.
We used MAC address control on the APs as we promised the company we would. But after hours and hours of trial and error, we discovered that after adding more than 17 MAC addresses to the control list on one AP, the AP would spontaneously loose all of its configuration data. This worked this way on both AP's. DLink was not helpful. We would later RMA one of these and the replacement would do the same. So, we ended up having to have control lists that were local instead of network-wide. This defeated the roaming feature of 802.11b entirely (although nobody has a laptop there right now, I don't like it one bit). It also causes more difficulty in configuring the damn things. My friend, who is an Apple Campus Rep, haunts me to this day with suggestions of buying their AirPort brand equipment and says it would work better. Anyway, we choose DLink 'cause it was a hell of a lot cheaper than Orinoco.
We saved the company lotsa money on their dial-up. Next, we moved their web pages in house on a Red Hat box on a DMZ. DMZ wasn't all that in SmoothWall at the time (no hole poking), but it did what we needed it to. We moved their primary DNS to publicdns.org and set up MX records, the whole works. Set up a sendmail box. Set them up with PHPGroupWare. And, we encouraged them to make donations to the various projects which provided them with these fine products and services. I felt all warm and fuzzy. I had turned them into a free-software shop on commodity hardware and it all worked.
After a while, I started getting phone calls from them saying their web pages were only accessible to some clients. I looked into this. I left myself a way to get in (a port forwarded to a pc with sshd, I had permission to do this), and so I hopped on in and looked around. I became acutely aware that my ssh sessions were being dropped very frequently. I kept getting some sort of error from my ssh client during sessions.
We went back down to isolate the problem. We kept removing pieces of hardware from the network to figure out what the &*^% was going on, but found nothing. Then we learned SmoothWall had added support for PPPoE. We scrapped the Linksys, and we had no more dropped TCP sessions. It was freaky . I have seen the same problem affect two other people who used port forwarding since then with Linksys boxes (I help folks out on Mandrake Expert). SmoothWall had also added better DMZ support. I just have to say the system works beautifully.
Other issues we encountered in the project were users compromising security by using AOL clients. AOL clients create VPNs which in theory could allow hackers to circumvent your company's security. Don't let your users do this.
Oh, I almost forgot, the AS400. Up until we set them up with a network, they were using this shitty twinax serial network to talk to their AS400. It was expensive. It required shitty ISA adapters to be installed in every PC. It almost made me puke.
At the start of the project in our proposal we told them that they should use encrypt everything, even internally, and that that was just common sense. We told them they could put the AS400 on the LAN and use ssh instead of those card-and-twinax interfaces. I even verified this with my fiancee's dad, an old-AS400-fart himself, before I promised them this. WE WERE WRONG.
IBM told us they COULD NOT RUN SSHD WITHOUT BUYING A NEW MACHINE. That is such a load of crap, but we, having no experience with AS400's, could do nothing about it. The IBM man convinced them to run telnet. We told them we would take no responsibility for that. End-of-story.
Hope this has been an informative venting session for all of you. Please note that there was some relevant content in here, and that SmoothWall solved some of my problems, and I think it is a great product.
My Smoothwall review (Score:5, Insightful)
My major concern is not, that somebody other than the administrator might log into the machine. The major issue of a firewall system is, to tighten security, not to remove existing security mechanisms like tight access rigts to sensitive files, shaddow passwords, etc. But that is exactly what Smoothwall does in direct comparism to any standard linux distribution.
I'm sorry, if the text doesn't make it clear, that I'm not complaining about the format of files but about sensitive files with passwords or secret keys, that are world readable (ie mode 0644). Something like
is a bad thing - period.
I made every effort, to get "printable" response from the developers. I wrote several E-Mails about the issues to Richard Morrel - who was named as contact person- and I went to the IRC channel of the developers. The only printable comment to the subject I got there is "This doesn't matter".
Re:No room for comments? (Score:2, Interesting)
>"...nor did i see anything to suggest he had even asked us about these so called "problems"."
In the review, the reviewer actually states:
>"My concrete indications of security problems within SmoothWall found sheer disinterest with Richard Morrell, developer and project initiator. "That doesn't matter" was about the politest of all comments comment (sic)."
The reviewer apparently did attempt to have a dialogue with one of the developers, and was rebuffed (apparently impolitely.) I have had a similar experience with at least one SmoothWall developer behaving somewhat less than tactfully.
Re:No room for comments? (Score:3, Funny)
I know... I know, don't feed... oh well.
Re:Daniel Goscomb seems far too complacent (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why not plaintext passwords? (Score:2, Insightful)
Whoever moderated this post as "Informative" needs to stick to moderating posts on which they are competent to judge, not just anything that sounds good but might be a line of complete BS.
Re:Why not plaintext passwords? (Score:2)
There are other reasons for keeping passwords in encrypted form as well, though such exploits are mostly limited to when people have physical access to the box. Not as likely, but still a good reason to routinely encrypt passwords.
Re:Why not plaintext passwords? (Score:2)
If bill has access to the shell on a smoothwall system, he can do whatever he wants. No one disputes that shadow passwords are useful on multiuser systems, but this isn't one.
Re:Bad Modding -1 offtopic (Score:2, Informative)
I wanted to build a firewall kit once... (Score:2)
1: Plain text passwords as sufficient security on a single-user system. OK. THis is sufficient security because the only user is root and thus if you are on the system you have complete control over it. However, it is not optimal security, which is what you really want in a firewall. If the root user changes the password, you know this as soon as you try to log in again and can take action, but if they can read the password, they cannot always be detected easily. Therefore encrypted passwords are important on a firewall because they can allow more freedom to an intruder after the first intrusion. Therefore, encrypted passwords are still useful and should be implimented.
2: Protection of VPN keys is not exactly necessary either but it is good practice because it prevents someone from masquerading as your trusted server.
3: Protection of your PPP password is less of an issue IMO, though with the modern wave of DMCA complaints on the part of the MPAA, it would probably be good...
Therefore all the normal security rules for multi-user systems are beneficial for these dedicated firewalls, but for different reasons. For many people, the Smoothwall system as described is probably sufficient, but it si not for high-security environments.
Re:The smoothwall team is full of GREAT IDEAs.. (Score:2, Informative)
Smoothwall GPL requires seperate hardware interfaces (modem/nic) per ip. The internal NIC can only view the splash page of smoothwall, and the external can't see it at all. By merely spoofing packets you cannot get to the internal ip.
But then you don't actually have an example of this spoofed packet that will fool smoothwall, do you?
Yes, smoothwall doesn't filter email. It's a conventional firewall. It's not a virus-checker. Compromised machines on the internal network can view the splash page of smoothwall. The splash page reveals the smoothwall version number and " 1:19pm up [REMOVED] days, [REMOVED], 0 users, load average: 0.38, 0.54, 0.57".
Anything more and you need http authentication. Show a theoretical exploit or calm down, please.
Well, in this case.. (Score:2)
Isn't that enough?