Book Image

Designing and Implementing Linux Firewalls and QoS using netfilter, iproute2, NAT and l7-filter

By : Lucian Gheorghe
Book Image

Designing and Implementing Linux Firewalls and QoS using netfilter, iproute2, NAT and l7-filter

By: Lucian Gheorghe

Overview of this book

Firewalls are used to protect your network from the outside world. Using a Linux firewall, you can do a lot more than just filtering packets. This book shows you how to implement Linux firewalls and Quality of Service using practical examples from very small to very large networks. After giving us a background of network security, the book moves on to explain the basic technologies we will work with, namely netfilter, iproute2, NAT and l7-filter. These form the crux of building Linux firewalls and QOS. The later part of the book covers 5 real-world networks for which we design the security policies, build the firewall, setup the script, and verify our installation. Providing only necessary theoretical background, the book takes a practical approach, presenting case studies and plenty of illustrative examples.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Designing and Implementing Linux Firewalls and QoS using netfilter, iproute2, NAT, and L7-filter
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

Chapter 2. Security Threats

Creating firewalls may block some malicious attempts on your network, but this step is far from running an entirely secure network. As a network administrator or security consultant, to design a proper firewall for your network you need to know what you defend your network from. We cannot fully discuss this topic, even in 1000 pages, but we want to explain some principles that you should consider in running a safe network.

As hard as it may seem to protect your network from the outside world, the most dangerous threats always come from inside your network. Whether it is a user with malicious intentions or a hacker who broke into a less important part of your network, the inner threat is the worse.

Besides outside and inside attacks on your network, there is one more attack type, called MIM (Man In the Middle) attack. This involves two trusted parts of your network that transit one or many routers that you don't control.

For instance, we might have a network in one...