Bootable CD w/OS for firewall

[jjohnson at sunrise-linux.com (miah)]

http://www.samag.com/documents/s=1824/sam0201d/0201d.htm

On Wed, Sep 15, 2004 at 11:15:39PM +0900, Derek Martin wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 15, 2004 at 09:12:57AM -0400, miah wrote:
> > advantage being if you get owned, you burn a new cd and reboot.  Since
> > its all a read-only filesystem that loads into memory anything an
> > attacker does is temporary.
> 
> It is possible to run a firewall in "shut down" state.  That is, you
> run shutdown, so that no processes are running, no processes can be
> spawned, but the kernel continues to filter packets.  Under such
> circumstances, it's virtually impossible to be owned, unless you can
> find a way to inject code into the running kernel to be executed.  I
> forget where I first saw this, but I imagine a web search on something
> like "firewall shutdown linux" will turn up useful results.
> 
> -- 
> Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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