Re: RFE: Connection Sharing



On Mon, 2006-08-28 at 00:51 +0200, Nicolas "Ikke" Trangez wrote:
> > If nothing else, we can likely make the assumption that if the user is
> > requesting the device to NAT some internal network onto the internet, he
> > trusts the internal network somewhat. The first two rules above with a
> > warning might also be a good first stab.
>
> I dont think you can just say 'the user will trust the internal network'. I think 
> at least when starting network sharing, you should give a choice: open
> up everything, or ask before allowing connections (MAC, or even better
> hostname based, when possible to get this hostname. mdns might be
> useful).
> Might be usefull to only allow certain "safe" connections by default
> too, like http/https, imap/imaps, ssh, ntp,... I dont think there's any
> need to allow P2P and other applications by default.

Agreed. Although, just to make sure we are on the same page, these
restrictions are for outbound connections -- inbound connections to the
internal nodes would be blocked anyway because of the NAT'ing.

As for the restrictions themselves, I don't know whether NM is the best
place to enforce firewalling of the internal network when it doesn't
handle firewalling of the actual internet interface. IMHO, it makes more
sense for NM to allow all outbound connections and let
system-config-security or something (which does handle other firewalling
needs) do the right thing for internal hosts. 

That said, if this were to be implemented, the actual security
restrictions provided by NM are a secondary matter IMHO. Adding the
NAT'ing/connection-sharing functionality would be more valuable -- even
without enhanced security for the internal network, connection-sharing
adds new functionality without compromising the security of the host
running NM. 

2c
-- 
Saikat

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