On Thu Jan 07, 2010 at 01:04:01PM -0800, Jay Hennigan <j...@west.net> wrote:
Or better:
- Allow from anywhere port 80 to server port > 1023 established
Adding "established" brings us back to stateful firewall!
Not really. It only looks to see if the ACK or RST bits are set. This
is different from a stateful firewall which memorizes each outbound
packet and checks the return for a match source/destination/sequence.
Actually, most firewalls don't check TCP sequence numbers. You are
totally correct in that stateless packet filters with "established" are
only looking for TCP bits, but the main difference that stateful
firewalls add is watching the TCP state machine. Sequence number
watching is a bonus, something you can enable on some firewalls, but
most of the common ones don't do it by default.
jms
--
Joel M Snyder, 1404 East Lind Road, Tucson, AZ, 85719
Senior Partner, Opus One Phone: +1 520 324 0494
j...@opus1.com http://www.opus1.com/jms
