Practical IT: are your firewalls in the wrong place?

Filed Under: Featured, Security threats

Firewall. Image from ShutterstockRewind to the 1990s, and the firewall was an organisation's main technical control for network security.

Firewalls were expensive, complicated and arcane. They sat right on the boundary between the dangerous public internet and your safe internal network.

The model was refined with the addition of the DMZ, or demilitarised zone. The DMZ was a buffer between your internal network and the internet in which you placed at-risk public-facing systems such as web and mail servers.

This model remains largely intact today, twenty years since the first commercial firewalls became available.

This is remarkable given that computer security pioneer Bill Cheswick pointed out the model's fundamental weakness in 1990 by describing a firewall as "a sort of crunchy shell around a soft, chewy center."

To its credit, the firewall has come a long way. Basic packet filtering capabilities are now de rigueur for anything with a network interface. Even smartphones can have their own software firewall.

Further up the value chain, UTMs are emerging as a popular and effective option for network security, providing sophisticated packet filtering, intrusion prevention, and a host of other features in a single box.

But perimeter controls, even with a segregated DMZ, are no longer enough. In many organisations, large and small, just mapping out the perimeter is an all-but-impossible job. (If you're not convinced, please read my previous article on Handling Perimeter Expansion and Disintegration.)

The problem is a sword with two edges:

  • The most popular (and useful) applications need access to the internet - exactly the ones you want to let through your firewall.
  • These internet-enabled applications are the most popular starting point for cybercriminals - exactly the ones you want to block at your firewall.

In other words, you've just drilled a hole through your "crunchy shell" that lets crooks access the very applications they'd probably have attacked first even if you didn't have a firewall.

Take a web application with a back-end database.

A standard architecture would probably place your web servers in the DMZ, and your back-end database on the internal corporate LAN. Traffic filtering would lock down the web servers so they could receive connections only from the outside, via the http and https ports (80 and 443), and make connections only to the inside, via the SQL port (e.g. 1433).

Unfortunately, this firewall configuration has two glaring problems. One, the ports required for your application to work are also the most vulnerable and interesting for an attacker. Two, it's doing nothing to isolate the attacker from other servers in the DMZ.

Your DMZ probably consists of a lot more than your web application servers. For example, it may also host your email and DNS servers.

Sadly, as penetration testers will tell you, it's often very easy to pivot between servers if there is no firewall between them. The result is that an attacker with access to one server in your DMZ, or worse still, your internal network, may quickly get into a lot of other systems.

You can boost your defences here by adding packet filtering between servers. There is usually little reason for servers that deliver unrelated applications to talk to each other. This is particularly true for risky services such as Windows RPC and RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol).

If you don't need to send packets from server X to server Y, why give an attacker the opportunity to do so?

You can add yet another defensive layer by being smarter and more scrupulous about the traffic you allow. For example, you need to allow outsiders to connect to port 80 on your web application server inside your DMZ. But you don't need to allow them to conduct just any sort of conversation on that port.

This is where protocol-aware protection technologies such as intrusion prevention systems (IPS), web application firewalls (WAF) and application control come into play.

Configuring "smart filtering" features of this sort is more complex than simply enabling or blocking network traffic by IP address or port number. Different protocols, and different applications using the same protocol, need different sorts of scrutiny. Set-and-forget, or a one-policy-fits-your-whole-network approach, isn't going to serve you well.

But configuring, managing and adapting your smart filtering policies doesn't have to be a burden, even though it's not as easy as clicking accept or deny against a list of port numbers.

The trend toward feature consolidation onto a single appliance can help. Delivering packet filtering, intrusion prevention, web application protection, load balancing and more on a single box can bring serious savings: defence in depth doesn't have to mean deeper pockets.

Firewall image from Shutterstock.

Do you run a network at home, perhaps for friends and family, or even just for fun? How well protected are you?

Why not try our free Sophos UTM Home Edition?

You get a web application firewall, web and email filtering, IPS, VPN and more for up to 50 IP addresses.

Turn that spare PC into a full-on network security appliance!

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7 Responses to Practical IT: are your firewalls in the wrong place?

  1. Rudy Nuff · 852 days ago

    With the Sophos UTM Home Edition the blurb says that you can use the "spare PC you have sitting in the corner", however further documentation says that you need two network cards - something that few 'spare PCs' have. Is it worth buying an extra card to introduce something that will cut off the internet if it breaks (or someone turns it off by accident)?

    • Kose · 851 days ago

      Your space PC sitting in the corner will have at least one network card, and at least one expansion slot (PCI/PCI-e) for a network card which will cost $15. Or if you have a laptop or small form factor PC, a USB - > Ethernet adapter for the same price.

      A "DONT TURN OFF" post it note costs fractions of a cent.

      • David Pottage · 848 days ago

        While I am sure that I could easily find an old PC, and a spare network card quite cheaply, my concern is the ongoing cost of turning a spare PC into a home firewall.

        A likey low end PC would consume arround 200W of power, which translates to arround 1700 units of electricity per year. In the UK a unit costs about 13p, so the overall cost of running an old PC as a firewall would be at least £220 per year, not including harware costs.

        You could save some of the electricity costs by running the firewall on low power hardware, eg a nettop, but seeing as you would have to go out and buy one, that would increase the hardware costs considerably.

  2. Guest · 852 days ago

    You can isolate DMZ hosts using VLANs and fw security zones. Also in a virtualized environment you can fw between vswitch hosts. Another layer would be host-based fw/IPS in the DMZ.

  3. Martin · 851 days ago

    An extra NIC will only cost a few pounds, ten max, so go for it. The external NIC can go straight to a DSL modem, so get rid of old routers etc as well. Just make sure you have enough RAM. 1.5GB seems OK for me. If you're worried about power drops, either get a cheap UPS or set BIOS on the old PC to auto on after power fail. Seems to recover fine. If worried about it getting turned off, don't be, it's fine living in a cupboard, no keyboard mouse or monitor needed after install (set BIOS to halt on no errors!). You also get 10 (12?) instances of Sophos endpoint protection for your other devices. A definite winner. Chuffed to bits with mine. Excellent use of old kit.

  4. GuitarBob · 851 days ago

    Sounds to me like you are getting beyond a home network!


    • TonyG · 851 days ago

      Take a PC, laptop, tablet and smart phone per user - that is 4 devices per user, so 16 for a household of 4. Now add network connections on TV, Bluray DVD, PVR and we are up to 19; throw in a NAS for photo storage and we have hit 20 connected devices for a family of 4. And that is without anything special, such as a couple of older Kindles.

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