particular rule can result in unforeseen results. One organization installed a new $50,000
firewall, only to discover that the security the firewall provided was too perfect—that is,
nothing was allowed in, and nothing was allowed out! It wasn’t until the firewall administrators
realized that the rule base was out of sequence that the problem was resolved.
Tables 6-16 through 6-19 show the rule sets, in their proper sequences, for both the external
and internal firewalls.
Note that the first rule prevents spoofing of internal IP addresses. The rule allowing responses
to internal communications (appearing in Table 6-16 as rule 6), comes after the four rules
prohibiting direct communications to or from the firewall (rules 2–5 in Table 6-16). In reality
rules 4 and 5 are redundant—rule 1 covers their actions. They are listed here for illustrative
purposes. Next comes the rules governing access to the SMTP server, denial of ping and
Telnet access, and access to the HTTP server. If heavy traffic to the HTTP server is
expected, move the HTTP server rule closer to the top (for example, into the position of
rule 2), which would expedite rule processing for external communications. Rules 8 and 9
are actually unnecessary as the cleanup rule would take care of their tasks. The final rule in
Table 6-16 denies any other types of communications. In the outbound rule set (Table 6-17)
the first rule allows the firewall, system, or network administrator to access any device,
including the firewall. Since this rule is on the outbound side, you do not need to worry
about external attackers or spoofers. The next four rules prohibit access to and by the
firewall itself, with the remaining rules allowing outbound communications and denying
all else.
Note the similarities and differences in the two firewalls’ rule sets. The internal filtering router/
firewall rule sets, shown in Tables 6-18 and 6-19, have to both protect against traffic to and
allow traffic from the internal network (192.168.2.0). Most of the rules in Tables 6-18
and 6-19 are similar to those in Tables 6-16 and 6-17: allowing responses to internal
communications; denying communications to and from the firewall itself; and allowing all
outbound internal traffic.
Because the 192.168.2.x network is an unrouteable network, external communications are
handled by the NAT server, which maps internal (192.168.2.0) addresses to external
(10.10.10.0) addresses. This prevents an attacker from compromising one of the internal
boxes and accessing the internal network with it. The exception is the proxy server (rule 7 in
Table 6-19 on the internal router’s inbound interface), which should be very carefully
configured. If the organization does not need the proxy server, as in cases where all externally
accessible services are provided from machines in the DMZ, then rule 7 is not needed. Note that
there are no ping and Telnet rules in Tables 6-18 or 6-19. This is because the external firewall
filters these external requests out. The last rule, rule 8, provides cleanup and may not be needed,
depending on the firewall.