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Door Locks
by Ian M on Sunday 05/May/2002, @18:02
Just because you can break in through the window, doesn't mean you shouldn't lock your door. When GRC was talking to Microsoft about the full implementation of TCP/IP in Windows XP Microsoft had a hard time grasping this concept. They argued that because drivers could be installed in current machines giving windows machines raw sockets (and thus ip-spoofing capablity), what could be so bad about giving alll windows machines this by default?

Having ZoneAlarm-like functionality would be nice in Linux because the crackers would have to go through the extra effort to get a program to connect to the internet without user permission. Though your right, checksums would be needed to verify programs or else getting around the firewall would be way to easy.

Ian
http://ian.webhop.org
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Re: Door Locks
by Simon on Monday 06/May/2002, @14:16
This is a good comment.
Zone-alarm is protecting us from "legitimate" software calling out without our knowledge ie spyware.
Further the spyware is only really hostile in the same sense that Mcdonalds is hostile, it's just something you want to keep under control before it does do you harm

This software can only crawl so far up the hostility ladder before the principals will fall foul of anti-hacking laws.
Commercial spyware that renames itself as mozilla to dial out would probably be illegal.

Light protection could be quite effective against spyware.
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  • Re: Door Locks
    by Michael on Tuesday 07/May/2002, @04:45
    If you don't trust your applications, you need sandboxing.

    Sandboxing, as I hinted above, is more than a 'yes/no' question to
    "can program X connect to x.x.x.x on port Y".

    By definition, that's a lot of questions to answer for your web browser -
    or else you allow your web browser all access on port 80? In which case, what are
    you protecting by asking the question?

    Perhaps you really want your web browser not to send personal info?

    "Protect the info" then seems a better idea than pretending you've secured
    the network against information leakage, no?

    You have to learn from the mistakes windows software has made,
    not copy what they do to try and reach the same unsatisfactory point.
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Re: Door Locks
by Michael on Tuesday 07/May/2002, @04:19
No, simply put, ZA doesn't make anything harder for code running on the
same machine as ZA.

Period.

(I would expand further on the performing moustaches stuff about raw sockets,
but there's plenty of that elsewhere - suffice to say linux tcp/ip has them and
I doubt you'll get far trying to get them removed - certainly not with
cliched statements about doors and windows)
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