In the vast and varied universe of computer books, only a few stand out as the best in their subject areas.
Building Internet Firewalls is one of those. It's deep, yet carefully focused, so that almost anything you might want to know about firewall strategies for protecting networks is here. In addition, there's lots of information on the reasons that we build firewalls in the first place, which is to say the security risks that come with Internet connectivity. You'll learn a great deal about Internet services and the protocols that provide them as you follow this book's recommendations for stifling attacks.
If there's a shortcoming to this book, it's its lack of coverage of the turnkey firewall products that are becoming popular among home and small-office users. Emphasis here is on more complicated network defenses that require careful design and setup--both design and implementation are the order of the day here. The authors carefully enumerate the threats they see in various situations, go into some detail on how those threats manifest themselves, and explain what configuration changes you can make to your perimeter defenses to repulse those threats. Plenty of illustrations make points about good and bad security strategies (you want to put the routers
here and
here, not
here or
here). You'll learn a lot by reading this book from cover to cover, no matter how much experience you have.
--David Wall Topics covered: Means of protecting private networks from external security threats. The authors go into detail on attackers' means of exploiting security holes in common Internet services, and show how to plug those holes or at least limit the damage that can be done through them. With coverage of Unix, Linux, and Windows NT, the authors detail their philosophies of firewall design and general security policy.
Customer Reviews & Comments
I have acquired a lot of web development tools e.g. ASP, JSP, javascript and so on, but I know nothing on how internet actually connects or how to secure a web page. Firewall has always come to my mind when i think about internet security, but I have no idea what it exactly is. Then, I find "Building Internet Firewalls" in a local bookstore one day. O'Reilly books always gives me bad impression that they are hard to understand and won't teach you from the basics. However, this book changes my mind totally. This book doesn't assume you have any experience on system Administration or knowledge on internet security. It starts out by explaining what firewall is. Then, it presents firewall technologies, architectures and design. After all the basics, it connects the concepts of firewall to Internet and how to configure it on UNIX and Window NT. In the last few chapters, it teaches how to maintain a firewall. I can't tell whether this book is good for system administration or someone already has some knowledge on firewall before. but for me, as an absolute beginner, it makes me understands firewall and I am confident that I can make my own firewall.
