On Nov 11, 2009, at 4:26 AM, Peter Rathlev wrote:

> I've read about this, but I fail to see what the point is.

The point is that there shouldn't be firewalls in front of servers in the first 
place, given that every packet which comes in is unsolicited and therefore the 
stateful inspection is both completely obviated and forms a DDoS chokepoint; 
and yet folks have been so conditioned by security snake-oil marketing to put 
firewalls in front of their servers that they do it anyways, complain to their 
vendors when said firewalls fall over with relatively small amounts of traffic 
due to state-table exhaustion, and thus need a way to disable the stateful 
inspection they paid so much to achieve so that they can still claim that 
they've a firewall in front of their servers, even though said firewalls are 
iatrogenic in nature.

;>

Folks should do as you say, hardening their servers/apps/services, enforcing 
policy via stateless ACLs in hardware, and deploying reaction tools such as 
S/RTBH.  Firewalls in front of servers is generally a Bad Idea, period.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Roland Dobbins <[email protected]> // <http://www.arbornetworks.com>

    Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

                        -- H.L. Mencken



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