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themighty1 / lpfw

Linux Personal Firewall
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Readme vs Security #34

Open wkirkpa1 opened 8 years ago

wkirkpa1 commented 8 years ago

I just played with lpfw for awhile and maybe I'm missing something, but the notion that ipfw firewalls applications to the level suggested in the readme isn't exactly true. Don't get me wrong, ipfw seems to to a fine job in the traditional Unix/Linux paradium, but today's desktop has completely trashed that. So, here's just a couple ...

  1. On KDE. Once you approve, say, Konquror to access the web, you've also silently approved kVirus, kPhoneHome, and most every other kApp now and forever. The user sees only one approval, for kdeinit.
  2. Life with proxies in general. Tor, polipo, privoxy, peerguardian, etc. sit under many desktops. So we've made it really easy for PhoneHome to just look kinda like a browser and get all the connectivity it needs to silently bypass lpfw. Even secretly dispatching your private info through the likes of Tor.

With every Android clock app on Google's play store demanding access to my Contacts, Photos, and Persoanl Information, I thought something like this on the desk couldn't hurt. I'm not worried so much about the stuff from signed distrubution repositories, but some people are I guess. They should know lpfw isn't going to protect them to the extent they think it might.

themighty1 commented 8 years ago

Thank you. This is a valid concern. It may be partially addressed by also allowing certain destinations, like e.g. allow konqueror access to *.wordpress.com. This will of course create a usability mess for novices.

licaon-kter commented 8 years ago

@wkirkpa1 On Android you have NetGuard ;) Regarding KDE or any other app for that matter, you know there's a price to pay (not money, but something more valuable that you can't get back... time) if you just blindly trust it with your data without researching it before deciding it's a good idea to run it (yes, open source access and many eyes help).

Did you test proxies before writing that, I mean LPFW won't trigger an access attempt to 127.0.0.1:port or LocalIP:port or something?

testbird commented 7 years ago

You could block all traffic for your entire box to be sure, run selected applications (like konqueror) in a tight sandbox (e.g. firejail) with a separate network stack, then allow only selected network connectivity you need for the sandbox, and never allow kPhoneHome or any other kApp to be in the same sandbox.