Firewalls

One problem with having a program on your machine listening on an open TCP port is that someone may connect and then, using some flaw in the software on your end, do something malicious to your machine. Damage can range from the unintended downloading of personal data to compromise and takeover of your entire machine, making it a distributor of viruses and worms or a steppingstone in later break-ins of other machines.

A strategy known as buffer overflow (22.2 Stack Buffer Overflow) has been the basis for a great many total-compromise attacks. The idea is to identify a point in a server program where it fills a memory buffer with network-supplied data without careful length checking; almost any call to the C library function gets(buf) will suffice. The attacker then crafts an oversized input string which, when read by the server and stored in memory, overflows the buffer and overwrites subsequent portions of memory, typically containing the stack-frame pointers. The usual goal is to arrange things so that when the server reaches the end of the currently executing function, control is returned not to the calling function but instead to the attacker’s own payload code located within the string.

A firewall is a mechanism to block connections deemed potentially risky, eg those originating from outside the site. Generally ordinary workstations do not ever need to accept connections from the Internet; client machines instead initiate connections to (better-protected) servers. So blocking incoming connections works reasonably well; when necessary (eg for games) certain ports can be selectively unblocked.

The original firewalls were built into routers. Incoming traffic to servers was often blocked unless it was sent to one of a modest number of “open” ports; for non-servers, typically all inbound connections were blocked. This allowed internal machines to operate reasonably safely, though being unable to accept incoming connections is sometimes inconvenient.

Nowadays per-host firewalls – in addition to router-based firewalls – are common: you can configure your workstation not to accept inbound connections to most (or all) ports regardless of whether software on the workstation requests such a connection. Outbound connections can, in many cases, also be prevented.

The typical home router implements something called network-address translation which, in addition to conserving IPv4 addresses, also provides firewall protection.