RE: Single Exchange/OWA on LAN with Internet Access - a good

["Ravdal, Stig" <SRavdal () Quiznos com>]

Hi Patrick and thanks for your comments.

Our firewall is certainly more than a packet filter - we use the border
router for basic packet filtering of bogus/spoofed traffic.  The
firewall we use is one of the market leaders and operates on layers 2-7,
stateful and all that.  However, I don't have enough hands-on experience
with it to be confident about how well it does the upper layers, how
many protocols and applications it has support of and the depth of
inspection.

Firewalls are certainly evolving beyond ports and addresses and we see
more and more specialized firewalls (e.g. XML firewall) that can do
application inspection.  Furthermore, the Inline IPS devices in some
cases are smart enough to know what hosts and vulnerabilities exist on
the network and can respond accordingly.  No, we're beyond packet
filtering, ports and IP addresses at this point.

In this respect I believe that the ISA firewall acting as the front-end
to OWA may do a better job at least for OWA/Exchange.  As you suggest if
you can address authentication (token/smart card/etc) before hitting the
OWA/Exchange box than the hurdle to overcome is most likely so
substantial that an attacker will go elsewhere and a script should fail.

I think as long as there are several hurdles to tackle - defense in
depth - it buys you time to detect what's going on in one of those
systems before the compromise is complete or successful.

Cheers and thanks,

Stig

-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick M. Hausen [mailto:hausen () punkt de] 
Sent: Monday, November 21, 2005 7:33 AM
To: Ravdal, Stig
Cc: firewall-wizards () honor icsalabs com
Subject: Re: [fw-wiz] Single Exchange/OWA on LAN with Internet Access -
a good

Hello!

Stig wrote:

> Our MS admins are proposing to implement single OWA/Exchange servers 
> on the LAN and allow access directly to the server through the
firewall.

IMHO this depends entirely on your definition of "firewall".

If the "firewall" in question is nothing more than a stupid
packet filtering device, then your network will be at a big risk.

If the firewall can do things like control what happens inside
the HTTP traffic for OWA, terminate SSL on the firewall for that
purpose, provide strong token based authentication _before_
the connection even hits your exchange server ... then I'd say
the benefits might outweigh the remaining risk.

Somehow most admins have been brain washed to believe that
"firewalls" are all about "port numbers". IMNSHO they are not.
They are choke points for policy enforcment. And policy includes
much more than just ports.

Regards, HTH,

Patrick M. Hausen
Leiter Netzwerke und Sicherheit
-- 
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