Firewall Wizards mailing list archives

Re: Effect of full disk on logging under FW-1 v 2.1?


From: Christopher Nicholls <chrisn () softway com au>
Date: Wed, 11 Feb 1998 09:36:53 +1100

At 10:03 10/02/98 +0100, Manuel.Gil () gecits-eu com wrote:




There is a test in DataCom WEB site, where you can find information about
the status of the Firewall-1 after you fill the disk with the log.

http://www.data.com/lab_tests/firewalls97.html

They say exactly:

                  The fourth attack involves filling the disk of the
firewall. If such an assault is mounted, a firewall should shut down. Only
those
                             products from Altavista, Cyberguard, Netguard
(Migdal Ha-Emek, Israel), Sun, and Trusted Information Systems Inc. (TIS,
                             Rockville, Md.) did so (the last two because
they run on Solaris, which shuts down in response to a full disk; versions
of TIS for
                             other operating systems will continue to
operate). The next best thing would be to continue operating but deny all
external
                             access attempts--which is what firewalls from
IBM and Milkyway did. All other products continued to operate normally,
which
                             raises a major security concern if logging
occurs on the firewall machine. Ideally, logs should be kept on an external
machine or
                             moved frequently to read-only media.

Folks,

If the firewall shuts down when the log disk fills up, as per the first
part of the quote above - doesn't that amount to a successful
denial-of-service attack?

Regards

Christopher

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Christopher Nicholls
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