The 2010 Personal Firewall Robustness Evaluation

With the advent of cheaper Internet connections, the number of Internet connections among home users is on the rise. Generally, home users have little understanding of the security concerns associated with Internet connectivity. To protect against computer attacks, generally a home user may install a personal firewall on his/her computer. To determine the effectiveness of personal firewalls, evaluation tests were performed against the ten firewall products available to users at local electronic stores and listed on popular firewall security websites. The firewalls were tested in their default and maximum security mode. The investigation was carried out by performing a port scan and vulnerability scan attacks against a computer with no firewall protection and computers running personal firewalls. The results of the investigation established that the computers running the firewalls exhibited some or all of the vulnerabilities detected on a computer with no firewall protection

Increasing Global Demand for an Uncensored Internet

This Note discusses efforts to defeat government censorship of the Internet. In the narrow meaning of that idea, this Note initially discusses technological efforts to circumvent government-imposed Internet firewalls; in the broader sense, it addresses the larger goal of inducing censoring governments to bring their firewalls down. Proposed U.S. legislation would provide U.S. government funding of censorship circumvention technology. This Note discusses why such funding is not a good approach. Absent larger international efforts, private action--within both the U.S. and censoring countries--has the best chance of bringing down government-run firewalls. This Note discusses how the U.S. government can best facilitate such private action through a two-pronged approach. The approach attempts to increase private circumvention efforts while decreasing U.S. corporate assistance in foreign governments\u27 censoring. This Note argues that such an approach would result in the possibility of censoring governments bringing down their firewalls because of an increased demand for an uncensored Internet and sufficient government frustration in maintaining such censorship

Firewall Technologies

Internet provides access to information and the ability to publish information in a revolutionary way. It is also a major danger that provides the ability to pollute and destroy information. A firewall is a form of protection that allows a network to connect to the Internet while maintaining a degree of security. In the paper we will describe the basics of firewalls and summarize what they can do and cannot do to help make sites securefirewall, Internet, networks, intrusion

Blocking Java Applets at the Firewall

This paper explores the problem of protecting a site on the Internet against hostile external Java applets while allowing trusted internal applets to run. With careful implementation, a site can be made resistant to current Java security weaknesses as well as those yet to be discovered. In addition, we describe a new attack on certain sophisticated firewalls that is most effectively realized as a Java applet