firewall with user interaction/netlink support

[Jeroen Wijnhout]

On Monday 06 December 2004 11:29, Dik Takken wrote:
> On Mon, 6 Dec 2004, Stefan Strasser wrote:
> > I hope I'm posting this to the right newsgroup.
> >
> > I wonder if there's any interest in implementing a kde application which
> > uses the netfilter support for user interaction, a "personal firewall"
> > for which you don't have to neccessarily set up rules but you are asked
> > when an application is trying to access the net.
>
> I don't think there will be any interest, because there's no reason to
> deny any application access to the internet. I don't know of any Linux

Ahum, spyware is not impossible on linux at all. Spyware can find its way into 
your system using social engineering techniques, rather than security holes. 
Such an app would be a user friendly tool to discover those.

> > this especially enables you to allow access for one applcation(e.g.
> > firefox) but disallow for another(e.g. a proprietary application trying
> > to call home),
>
> What proprietary Linux application would that be? I know plenty of Windows
> programs that aren't decent enough to allow access to the net, but we're
> talking Linux here..
>
> Anyway, if anyone would ever want to have something like this, he/she
> would need to implement it in the Linux kernel. KDE has no control over
> which applications can access the internet and which can not, which is a
> Very Good Thing (tm). Once the kernel has support for application-level
> blocking, KDE might be able to negotiate between kernel, user and
> application about network access.

It already exists (by the NSA) and it is called SELinux, many distros already 
support this.

best,
Jeroen
-- 
Kile - KDE Integrated LaTeX Editor
http://kile.sourceforge.net