Firewall FAQ

General

1. What is a network firewall?
2. What makes P662 secure?
3. What are the basic types of firewalls?
4. What kind of firewall is the P662?
5. Why do you need a firewall when your router has packet filtering and NAT built-in?
6. What is Denials of Service (DoS)attack?
7. What is Ping of Death attack?
8. What is Teardrop attack?
9. What is SYN Flood attack?
10. What is LAND attack?
11. What is Brute-force attack?
12. What is IP Spoofing attack?
13. What are the default ACL firewall rules in P662?

1. What is a network firewall?

A firewall is a system or group of systems that enforces an access-control policy between two networks. It may also be defined as a mechanism used to protect a trusted network from an untrusted network. The firewall can be thought of two mechanisms. One to block the traffic, and the other to permit traffic.

2. What makes P662 secure?

The P662 is pre-configured to automatically detect and thwart Denial of Service (DoS) attacks such as Ping of Death, SYN Flood, LAND attack, IP Spoofing, etc. It also uses stateful packet inspection to determine if an inbound connection is allowed through the firewall to the private LAN. The P662supports Network Address Translation (NAT), which translates the private local addresses to one or multiple public addresses. This adds a level of security since the clients on the private LAN are invisible to the Internet.

3. What are the basic types of firewalls?

Conceptually, there are three types of firewalls:

1. Packet Filtering Firewall
2. Application-level Firewall
3. Stateful Inspection Firewall

Packet Filtering Firewalls generally make their decisions based on the header information in individual packets. These header information include the source, destination addresses and ports of the packets.

Application-level Firewalls generally are hosts running proxy servers, which permit no traffic directly between networks, and which perform logging and auditing of traffic passing through them. A proxy server is an application gateway or circuit-level gateway that runs on top of general operating system such as UNIX or Windows NT. It hides valuable data by requiring users to communicate with secure systems by mean of a proxy. A key drawback of this device is performance.

Stateful Inspection Firewalls restrict access by screening data packets against defined access rules. They make access control decisions based on IP address and protocol. They also 'inspect' the session data to assure the integrity of the connection and to adapt to dynamic protocols. The flexible nature of Stateful Inspection firewalls generally provides the best speed and transparency, however, they may lack the granular application level access control or caching that some proxies support.

4. What kind of firewall is the P662?

1. The P662's firewall inspects packets contents and IP headers. It is applicable to all protocols, that understands data in the packet is intended for other layers, from network layer up to the application layer.
2. The P662's firewall performs stateful inspection. It takes into account the state of connections it handles so that, for example, a legitimate incoming packet can be matched with the outbound request for that packet and allowed in. Conversely, an incoming packet masquerading as a response to a nonexistent outbound request can be blocked.
3. The P662's firewall uses session filtering, i.e., smart rules, that enhance the filtering process and control the network session rather than control individual packets in a session.
4. The P662's firewall is fast. It uses a hashing function to search the matched session cache instead of going through every individual rule for a packet.
5. The P662's firewall provides email service to notify you for routine reports and when alerts occur.

5. Why do you need a firewall when your router has packet filtering and NAT built-in?

With the spectacular growth of the Internet and online access, companies that do business on the Internet face greater security threats. Although packet filter and NAT restrict access to particular computers and networks, however, for the other companies this security may be insufficient, because packets filters typically cannot maintain session state. Thus, for greater security, a firewall is considered.

6. What is Denials of Service (DoS)attack?

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are aimed at devices and networks with a connection to the Internet. Their goal is not to steal information, but to disable a device or network so users no longer have access to network resources.

There are four types of DoS attacks:

1. Those that exploits bugs in a TCP/IP implementation such as Ping of Death and Teardrop.
2. Those that exploits weaknesses in the TCP/IP specification such as SYN Flood and LAND Attacks.
3. Brute-force attacks that flood a network with useless data such as Smurf attack.
4. IP Spoofing

7. What is Ping of Death attack?

Ping of Death uses a 'PING' utility to create an IP packet that exceeds the maximum 65535 bytes of data allowed by the IP specification. The oversize packet is then sent to an unsuspecting system. Systems may crash, hang, or reboot.

8. What is Teardrop attack?

Teardrop attack exploits weakness in the reassemble of the IP packet fragments. As data is transmitted through a network, IP packets are often broken up into smaller chunks. Each fragment looks like the original packet except that it contains an offset field. The Teardrop program creates a series of IP fragments with overlapping offset fields. When these fragments are reassembled at the destination, some systems will crash, hang, or reboot.

9. What is SYN Flood attack?

SYN attack floods a targeted system with a series of SYN packets. Each packet causes the targeted system to issue a SYN-ACK response, While the targeted system waits for the ACK that follows the SYN-ACK, it queues up all outstanding SYN-ACK responses on what is known as a backlog queue. SYN-ACKs are moved off the queue only when an ACK comes back or when an internal timer (which is set a relatively long intervals) terminates the TCP three-way handshake. Once the queue is full , the system will ignore all incoming SYN requests, making the system unavailable for legitimate users.

10. What is LAND attack?

In a LAN attack, hackers flood SYN packets to the network with a spoofed source IP address of the targeted system. This makes it appear as if the host computer sent the packets to itself, making the system unavailable while the target system tries to respond to itself.

11 What is Brute-force attack?

A Brute-force attack, such as 'Smurf' attack, targets a feature in the IP specification known as directed or subnet broadcasting, to quickly flood the target network with useless data. A Smurf hacker flood a destination IP address of each packet is the broadcast address of the network, the router will broadcast the ICMP echo request packet to all hosts on the network. If there are numerous hosts, this will create a large amount of ICMP echo request packet, the resulting ICMP traffic will not only clog up the 'intermediary' network, but will also congest the network of the spoofed source IP address, known as the 'victim' network. This flood of broadcast traffic consumes all available bandwidth, making communications impossible.

12. What is IP Spoofing attack?

Many DoS attacks also use IP Spoofing as part of their attack. IP Spoofing may be used to break into systems, to hide the hacker's identity, or to magnify the effect of the DoS attack. IP Spoofing is a technique used to gain unauthorized access to computers by tricking a router or firewall into thinking that the communications are coming from within the trusted network. To engage in IP Spoofing, a hacker must modify the packet headers so that it appears that the packets originate from a trusted host and should be allowed through the router or firewall.

13. What are the default ACL firewall rules in P662?

There are two default ACLs pre-configured in the P662, one allows all connections from LAN to WAN and the other blocks all connections from WAN to LAN except of the DHCP packets.

All contents copyright (c) 2003 ZyXEL Communications Corporation.