Building Internet Firewalls (2nd Edition) (Paperback)

by Elizabeth D. Zwicky (Author), Simon Cooper (Author), D. Brent Chapman (Author)
Key Phrases: bastion hosts, firewall architectures, remote console, Out Int Ext, Protocol Source Port Dest, Source Dest (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
In the vast and varied universe of computer books, only a few stand out as the best in their subject areas. Building Internet Firewalls is one of those. It's deep, yet carefully focused, so that almost anything you might want to know about firewall strategies for protecting networks is here. In addition, there's lots of information on the reasons that we build firewalls in the first place, which is to say the security risks that come with Internet connectivity. You'll learn a great deal about Internet services and the protocols that provide them as you follow this book's recommendations for stifling attacks.

If there's a shortcoming to this book, it's its lack of coverage of the turnkey firewall products that are becoming popular among home and small-office users. Emphasis here is on more complicated network defenses that require careful design and setup--both design and implementation are the order of the day here. The authors carefully enumerate the threats they see in various situations, go into some detail on how those threats manifest themselves, and explain what configuration changes you can make to your perimeter defenses to repulse those threats. Plenty of illustrations make points about good and bad security strategies (you want to put the routers here and here, not here or here). You'll learn a lot by reading this book from cover to cover, no matter how much experience you have. --David Wall

Topics covered: Means of protecting private networks from external security threats. The authors go into detail on attackers' means of exploiting security holes in common Internet services, and show how to plug those holes or at least limit the damage that can be done through them. With coverage of Unix, Linux, and Windows NT, the authors detail their philosophies of firewall design and general security policy.

Product Description
In the five years since the first edition of this classic book, Internet use has exploded. The commercial world has rushed headlong into doing business on the Web, often without integrating sound security technologies and policies into their products and methods. The security risks--and the need to protect both business and personal data--have never been greater. Like the highly respected, bestselling first edition, Building Internet Firewalls, 2nd Edition, is a practical and detailed step-by-step guide to designing and installing firewalls and configuring Internet services to work with a firewall. Much expanded to include Linux and Windows coverage, the second edition describes a variety of firewall technologies and architectures. It also contains a new set of chapters describing the issues involved in a variety of Internet services and protocols through a firewall. In addition to the standard email, News, FTP, DNS, and Telnet services, the book now covers web services and scripting languages, Windows NT services, authentication and auditing services, intermediary protocols, and database protocols. The book also has a complete list of resources, including the location of many publicly available firewall construction tools.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 869 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.; 2nd edition (January 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565928717
• ISBN-13: 978-1565928718
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.2 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #136,164 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

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 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

This review is from: Building Internet Firewalls (Paperback)

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.