Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World, 15th Anniversary Edition

12

Network Defenses

FIREWALLS

The first firewalls were on trains. Coal-powered trains had a large furnace in the engine room, along with a pile of coal. The engineer would shovel coal into the engine. This process created coal dust, which was highly flammable. Occasionally the coal dust would catch fire, causing an engine fire that sometimes spread into the passenger cars. Since dead passengers reduced revenue, train engines were built with iron walls right behind the engine compartment. This stopped fires from spreading into the passenger cars, but didn't protect the engineer between the coal pile and the furnace. (There's a lesson for sysadmins in this somewhere.)

In the digital world, a firewall is a machine that protects a company's internal network from the malicious hackers, ravenous criminals, and desultory evildoers who lurk throughout the Internet. It keeps intruders out.

The definitions don't parallel well, and that's because the term “firewall” has changed meaning since it was first used in computer networks. The original networks were buggy and would inveterately crash. Firewalls were installed to prevent bad networking software in one part of the network from taking the rest of the network down with it. They were, like physical firewalls, machines designed to contain problems within a small area of a network.

Today's firewalls act as boundaries between private networks and the vast public network. They keep intruders out, and only allow authorized users in. They might ...