Building Internet Firewalls (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: bastion hosts, firewall architectures, remote console, Out Int Ext, Protocol Source Port Dest, Source Dest (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Simply put, a firewall is a way to restrict access between the Internet and your company's internal network. It enables you to get out to the Net while keeping unauthorized people from breaking into your systems. This is a solid, definitive text for building Internet firewalls that every system administrator who is connecting to the Net should own. Written in down-to-earth yet detailed style, you're guided through the entire process of designing, building and maintaining firewalls. The preface gives the best reason for using this book to build firewalls: "In any society, a small percentage of people are malicious." Indeed.

Product Description

More than a million systems are now connected to the Internet, and something like 15 million people in 100 countries on all seven continents use Internet services. More than 100 million email messages are exchanged each day, along with countless files, documents, and audio and video images. Although businesses are rushing headlong to get connected to the Internet, the security risks have never been greater. Some of these risks have been around since the early days of networking -- password attacks (guessing them or cracking them via password dictionaries and cracking programs), denial of service, and exploiting known security holes. Some risks are newer and even more dangerous -- packet sniffers, IP (Internet Protocol) forgery, and various types of hijacking. Firewalls are a very effective way to protect your system from these Internet security threats. Building Internet Firewalls is a practical guide to building firewalls on the Internet. If your site is connected to the Internet, or if you're considering getting connected, you need this book. It describes a variety of firewall approaches and architectures and discusses how you can build packet filtering and proxying solutions at your site. It also contains a full discussion of how to configure Internet services (e.g., FTP, SMTP, Telnet) to work with a firewall, as well as a complete list of resources, including the location of many publicly available firewall construction tools.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (September 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565921240
• ISBN-13: 978-1565921245
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,753,590 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars good book even for absolute beginner, July 6, 2000

By	bookmark (usa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Building Internet Firewalls (2nd Edition) (Paperback)

I have acquired a lot of web development tools e.g. ASP, JSP, javascript and so on, but I know nothing on how internet actually connects or how to secure a web page. Firewall has always come to my mind when i think about internet security, but I have no idea what it exactly is. Then, I find "Building Internet Firewalls" in a local bookstore one day.

O'Reilly books always gives me bad impression that they are hard to understand and won't teach you from the basics. However, this book changes my mind totally.

This book doesn't assume you have any experience on system Administration or knowledge on internet security. It starts out by explaining what firewall is. Then, it presents firewall technologies, architectures and design. After all the basics, it connects the concepts of firewall to Internet and how to configure it on UNIX and Window NT. In the last few chapters, it teaches how to maintain a firewall.

I can't tell whether this book is good for system administration or someone already has some knowledge on firewall before. but for me, as an absolute beginner, it makes me understands firewall and I am confident that I can make my own firewall.

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Informative Reference, August 23, 2000

By	Todd Hawley (San Francisco CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Building Internet Firewalls (2nd Edition) (Paperback)

This second edition goes into great detail on how to build and maintain a firewall. It briefly discusses the attacks earlier this year on various well-known web sites and notes that one effective way of (if not toally stopping) slowing down these types of attacks is by use of a firewall.

In the first section, it talks about the reasons for having a firewall and security strategies. The second section (Building Firewalls) consists of several chapters and describes topics like packet filtering, firewall architectures and design, proxy systems and bastion hosts. I gleaned a lot of good information from this section alone.

The next section contains chapters describeing how to protect against attackers invading any Internet services (World Wide Web, email & netnews, FTP, IRC, DNS, games, etc). The last section describes methods to keep your network secure, such as settinp up security policies, how to maintain your firewall once it's up and running, and how to deal with a "break-in." There's also three appendices containing various information about firewall tools, mailing lists and newsgroups.

All in all, an excellent book on building and maintaining a firewall.

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars True, this book is now classic, December 28, 1999

By	horio shoichi <[e-mail]> (Chiba, Japan) - See all my reviews

Since there was no such thing as CIDR when it was written, we now have a few reserves to directly apply the book's conclusions. Because private IPs were rather new then, the authors did not take advantage of their security aspects. It was written at the time passive mode ftp was rather rare. Because there was no IP masquerades nor NAT, authors' choices for outbound connections were limited to few proxies and impractical packet filtering. PC unix-likes, which are the major player in building firewalls nowadays, were infantile, it they existed. There were very few choices on packet filters, the most important firewall component. Dialup connections were yet negligible, so the book did not discuss personal securities when connected to internet.

In spite of all these and other changes, the book solidly laid out firewall network structures. We don't see any significant variations of them, as yet. Its in depth discussions on impacts of various tcp/udp/icmp protocols upon firewalls are now the criteria we use to judge safeties of newly proposed ones. Despite new security softwares, and new exploits I must add, arrive daily, the book has established true home ground we start from. On the other hand, I am certainly interested in what authors would say looking at changes we have encountered.