This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
5.2 A Theory of Firewalls
Fundamentally, a traditional firewall is a security policy enforcement device that takes advantage of a topological chokepoint. Let’s look at it analytically. There are three properties necessary for a firewall to be effective:
- There must exist a topological chokepoint at which to place a firewall. Formally, we can regard the network as a graph and the firewall as a cutpoint that partitions the graph into two or more disjoint components.
- The nodes on the “inside” of the firewall share the same security policy. (See Section 16.2 for more discussion about creation of security policies.)
- All nodes on the “inside” must be “good”; all nodes on the outside are, if not actually “bad,” untrusted.
When one or more of these conditions does not hold, a firewall cannot succeed. Today, none are true for the typical enterprise.
Property 1 fails because of the number of links a typical company has, links that do not go through “the” firewall. These links may be to suppliers, customers, joint venture partners, outsourcees, what have you.
Property 2 fails because of the number of computers used today. With so many nodes, the policies have to differ drastically. When firewalls first became popular, only a small subset of employees needed Internet connectivity. For all practical purposes, there was no web. Email was not the way business was done. Documents were faxed rather than scanned and attached. If, by some chance, your company needed connectivity to another company, you leased a circuit from the phone company, but that wasn’t a gross exposure because most companies didn’t have very much connectivity even internally. (Bear in mind that Firewalls came out 
years before the release of Windows 95, the first Microsoft operating system with TCP/IP support. You could get TCP/IP, but it was an add-on product from some outside vendor. Most machines were not upgraded in that fashion.)
Property 3 fails, too, partly because of the large population on the inside, and partly because of mobile nodes: if they get infected when they’re on the outside, they’re effectively bad guys when inside the firewall.
There’s a corollary to this: firewalls can work in environments where these conditions still hold. To take a neglected but important case, most residences are protectable by firewalls. (Admittedly, parents and teenagers often disagree on the proper security policy or even on what constitutes “good” behavior. Besides, consumers have smart phones and laptops, too. Computer-savvy parents will sometimes set up a separate “teen-net,” isolated from “parent-net.”)
It is worth noting that these three properties, with the possible exception of Property 3, are not absolute; tolerating minor deviations is feasible. You can have two or possibly three firewalls—with more than that, coordinating policy is hard, and there’s too much chance of return traffic going through a different firewall—you can have a small number of different policies for machines like the mail server, etc.
Given this model, we can construct scenarios where firewalls are effective. A degenerate case is a single machine. If we regard the firewall as residing between the network interface and the TCP/IP stack (and this is, in fact, how it is often implemented), all three conditions are obviously satisfied. What makes this interesting is where policy comes from. All current operating systems permit the machine’s administrator to set the policy for that machine. Some packages permit a central administrator to ship policy to many endpoints. Finally, if we use cryptographically verified identity to accomplish our partition (and thus use a virtual network topology rather than a physical one), we achieve the distributed firewall described in [Bellovin 1999].
A more interesting case is a departmental print server. The policy is simple: anyone within the department is allowed to print; no one outside is allowed to print at all. Property 2 is therefore satisfied. Departments typically don’t have rich connectivity, thus satisfying Property 1. Finally, since by policy anyone on the inside has permission to use the printers, everyone is by definition good, satisfying the final property.
There’s one wrinkle. If the department has an external link, perhaps to a supplier, systems on the far side of that link should be barred from reaching the printer. That could be accomplished by a packet filter on the router handling that connection; alternately (and per the discussion below on threat models), it can be ignored.
It is fair to ask what other choices there might be. Any network connected device needs some sort of access control; many do not provide it, or do not do a good job of it. Your typical printer, for example, does not support TLS or logins and passwords; if it did, many computers would have trouble talking to it. However, some sort of access control is necessary; I do not want some bored teenager launching a denial of service attack on my paper budget or on my printers’ hardware [Cui and Stolfo 2011]. (I recently bought a new home printer with IPv6 support—which I promptly turned off because there was no access control option; anyone who knew its name or IP address could have reached it.)
There are other services that are commonly used within a department or other small group; file servers are the obvious example. These often do have their own authentication; nevertheless, the service provided is sufficiently sensitive (and the underlying code has been sufficiently buggy, at least in the past) that an extra layer of protection is useful.
The solution is a point firewall, a simple firewall in front of a limited set of resources. Point firewalls work because of their scope: they are not trying to protect arbitrarily many devices, they are not enforcing complex rules, they are not dealing with thousands of exceptions. There is also a more subtle philosophical difference: their primary function is not just bug deflection; rather, they are add-on access control mechanisms. Nevertheless, since they are enforcing a policy they qualify as firewalls.
If we add the threat environment to our model, we can generalize still further. In particular, we will assess the properties separately for different threat levels. When we do, we see that enterprise firewalls do provide a modicum of protection against low-skill hackers. Specifically, let’s consider joy hackers.
Property 2 is effectively true; typically, everyone has the same policy against the sorts of attacks launched by joy hackers. A simple “no inbound calls” policy, plus rules to force all mail and perhaps web traffic through specific virus scanner-equipped gateways will likely handle all of the usual attacks from that grade of bad guy.
Property 1 is more subtle. If we temporarily ignore links to other companies, we’re left with the usual handful of connections to ISPs; these are the traditional locations for firewalls. This property is thus satisfied.
It is Property 3 that is the most interesting for this scenario. I will assert that at the joy hacker level, to a first approximation all employees are honest good guys. Yes, there is embezzlement, insider trading, and the usual rate of petty thefts from the stockroom or the paper cabinet (Bell Labs used to use four ring loose leaf binders, apparently to discourage people from bringing these home as school supplies). However, what little low-grade technical malfeasance there is tends to be locally targeted; employees will attack what they know, and by definition unskilled attackers do not have the tools or knowledge to learn the extended network topology, especially to other companies. We thus satisfy Property 3 and Property 1.
The risk from mobile devices remains, but today’s dangerous viruses are not the work of script kiddies. We can thus conclude that traditional enterprise firewalls do provide some protection.
Our protection breaks down if we consider opportunistic hackers, and of course all bets are off when dealing with MI-31. An opportunistic hacker is capable of launching sophisticated viruses and worms, working out (or stumbling on) a path through interconnected companies (or using a worm that does the same thing), and so on. We thus lose Property 1. Property 2 also fails, because a sophisticated attacker can find and exploit weaker policies. Still, the biggest risks can be deflected, at least partially, if we can protect the external links (Chapter 11).
Targetiers don’t have much technical skill, but they are targeting you. If nothing else, it means that we lose Property 3 because such people will resort to physical presence in their attacks. Depending on just how much skill they have, they may also be able to exploit links between companies, which violates Property 1. In other words, enterprise firewalls do not protect against higher grades of attackers.
It is important to realize that the three properties were applicable all along; however, in the mid-1990s the threat profile was very different. There were few targetiers or Andromedans, with the arguable exception of Cliff Stoll’s Stasi-controlled East Germans [1988; 1989]. There were opportunistic attackers, including some very good ones, but with no interconnected companies and few mobile devices their scope of operation was limited.
Another way to think about firewalls is to realize that no firewall can provide protection at any layer other than the one at which it operates. A typical packet filter, for example, works at layer 3 and a bit of layer 4 (the port numbers); as such, it can filter by IP address and service. It can’t look at MAC addresses (especially from more than one hop away because it never sees them!), nor can it look inside email messages. The trouble is that a good firewall needs to operate at multiple layers. It may need to do TCP normalization, to deal with attackers who are playing games with the subtle semantics of TCP [Handley, Kreibich, and Paxson 2001]; it definitely needs to scan email for viruses, block nasty web sites, and more. Furthermore, the trend in recent years has been to layer more and more non-web protocols on top of HTTP or HTTPS, rather than directly on TCP or TCP+TLS; simple port number filtering or circuit relaying will no longer do the job. (HTTP is sometimes referred to as the “universal solvent for firewalls.”) Indeed, even in Firewalls we described the need for FTP and X11 application proxies; the need has gotten much more urgent since then.
One result of the increased attention to higher-level protocols has been the rise of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) [N. Anderson 2007]. A DPI firewall has rules and policies that look at more or less arbitrary parts of packets. This is difficult, and not just because of performance issues; in general TCP implementations will split up messages as they see fit, forcing a DPI system to reassemble packets and keep extra state. Furthermore, the ability to express policies in terms of the contents of packets has led to evermore complex policies; these themselves are a significant source of trouble.
The result of this shift is that firewalls have gotten far more complex. There are many more different application that are of interest; each of them requires custom code on the firewall to enforce policies and to delete or otherwise defang sketchy stuff. This is bad for security. It pays to look back at what Cheswick and I wrote in Firewalls:
- Axiom 1 (Murphy) All programs are buggy.
- Theorem 1 (Law of Large Programs) Large programs are even buggier than their size would indicate.
- Proof: By inspection.
- Corollary 1.1 A security-relevant program has security bugs.
- Theorem 2 If you do not run a program, it does not matter whether or not it is buggy.
- Proof: As in all logical systems, (false ⇒ true) = true.
- Corollary 2.1 If you do not run a program, it does not matter if it has security holes.
- Theorem 3 Exposed machines should run as few programs as possible; the ones that are run should be as small as possible.
- Proof: Follows directly from Corollary 1.1 and Corollary 2.1.
- Corollary 3.1 (Fundamental Theorem of Firewalls) Most hosts cannot meet our requirements: they run too many programs that are too large. Therefore, the only solution is to isolate them behind a firewall if you wish to run any programs at all.
In other words, the reason that firewalls were secure is that they ran many fewer programs, and hence didn’t have as much vulnerable code. Given the hundreds of applications that a modern firewall has to support, and given the complexity of some of those applications (e.g., SIP), it is far from clear that less code is involved. In fact, an enterprise firewall today, supporting very many users, endpoints, and policies, is arguably running more Internet-facing code than a typical host. Perhaps the code is higher quality, and perhaps the firewalls are better administered than end user machines—but perhaps not.
The code complexity issue is another driver for smaller, more specialized firewalls. The XML-scanning firewall protecting some database machine may be just as buggy as the same code on an apatosaurus-sized firewall for the enterprise, but if it fails it exposes one database machine, not an entire company.
We can therefore draw some conclusions about the role of firewalls in today’s net.
- Small-scale firewalls, protecting a network about the size run by a single system administrator, still serve a useful function. Generally speaking, these will be packet filters and hence not require extra hardware.
- Complex server applications are rarely amenable to firewall protection, unless the firewall has some very, very good (and very, very well-written) sanitizing technology.
- An enterprise firewall retains value against low-skill attackers but is actually a point of risk, not protection, when trying to filter complex protocols against sophisticated adversaries. If you have such services that must be accessible from the outside, use packet filtering on the enterprise firewall and a separate protection layer near the server itself. This is discussed in more detail in Section 11.3.
- Arguably, mobile devices—laptops, tablets, smart phones—should never be fully trusted, not because they use wireless connections, but because they’re much more likely to carry malware (see Property 3). This suggests that your wireless LAN should be outside the firewall, with a VPN+filter for access by iToys and the like. The suggestion is analyzed in greater detail in Chapter 9.