Firewall Builder Success Stories

Jean-Michel Poure, CEO On-line Translation and Localization Services, Axitrad, France

Jean-Michel Poure,
CEO On-line Translation and Localization Services,
Axitrad, France

Fwbuilder is a state-of-the-art firewall solution leveraging the power of Linux iptables. Our company chose this solutions to protect a DMZ with several servers, two sub-networks as well as a remote backup repository on a VPN.

Fwbuilder enabled us to implement tight security on three firewalls using one single configuration interface defining all network objects and rules. We see no limitation to the power of Fwbuilder because it is an open-source software developed on SourceForge with a growing community of users. In the future, we will probably implement firewalling rules on all Linux servers of our company (in the DMZ first and then on other servers). This is the power of Open-Source vs commercial software: with Fwbuilder, virtually any Linux box can be secured.

To us, Fwbuilder is the typical example which demonstrates the superiority of Open source software: power, reliability and no barrier to business success. Why spend money for a security 'something' that will bring you 'nothing' but trouble and insecurity. Efficient companies should choose Fwbuilder as a security solution.

Jens Hektor, Network Operation Center, RWTH Aachen, Germany, Technical University

Jens Hektor
Network Operation Center
RWTH Aachen, Germany, Technical University

Organization:
The institution was founded as a Polytechnikum in 1870 with considerable support from local industry. It became a Technische Hochschule (Institute of Technology) in 1880 and was established in 1948 as Rheinisch-WestfDlische Technische Hochschule Aachen (RWTH), the Institute of Technology of the State of Nordrhein-Westfalen in the new Federal Republic of Germany.

In the late 1960s, RWTH expanded into a full university by the addition of Faculties of Medicine, Humanities and Economics, but without changing its traditional designation as a Technische Hochschule, since then translated as Aachen University of Technology.

Goal:
Universities are a prime target of crackers. With lots of computer online there are often some systems who should have received a bit more attention. Due to the chronic lack of personal resources at universities these boxes are often forgotten and cracked several months later. Firewalls can help the admins to tighten security in the internet.

Solution:
What helps the admin setting up a firewall? Having knowledge about what "his users" need, about "his servers" and about the protocols involved. And he needs a tool helping him to convert this knowledge into rules efficiently.

"Fwbuilder" is the state-of-the-art GPL'd application to perform this task. A couple of administrators at RWTH have already choosen fwbuilder and more will follow. In fact we have noew nearly every week administrators who renovate their firewalls with fwbuilder. This is supported by the computing centre of RWTH.

Its ease of use, its very handy graphical user interface and the quality of the generated scripts from the rulesets make fwbuilder the top object oriented application for configuring firewalls in the linux world.

Laurent Peaucelle, Customer Service Manager, EPTICA S.A.

Laurent Peaucelle,
Customer Service Manager,
EPTICA S.A., spinoff of MATRAnet, France

Organization:
EPTICA, a MATRAnet spin off, becomes a new player on the Web Call Center market with its solution M>WebTouch. In addition to the e-CRM software solution M>WebTouch, the spin off benefits from an established and experienced team, a customer base of approximately 20 clients and a presence in 10 countries through a network of international partners.

Goal:
In order to protect their internal network and limit the access to their public website, EPTICA team needs a robust firewall. They prefer to use open-source tools, but the solution has to be easy to implement and maintain.

Solution:
IPtables, the next generation of IPchains, seems to be the best and most reliable open-source firewall on the market. But it is not easy to implement for a non-specialist. Writing all the rules one by one becomes painful. This is where FirewallBuilder can help big time. Implementation:
Installing Firewall Builder on EPTICA servers has be done in no time. We just had to download the recommended RPMs corresponding to our RedHat 7.X Linux distribution. Firewall Builder is well integrated with Gnome X environment so that there is no line of code to type. Everything is full drag-and-drop! The online FAQ answers most of the basic questions one can have in front of a new interface. All the rules can be build quite easily, even NAT rules.

Conclusion:
Firewall Builder allows not-too-technical people to configure IPtables in a fast and efficient way to protect their network. EPTICA definitely recommend it!

Jim McCormack, Systems Administrator, iRobot, USA

Jim McCormack,
Systems Administrator,
iRobot, USA

Organization:
iRobot is a leader in the rising fields of robotics and artificial intelligence. We develop a wide variety of intelligent robots for innovative applications in entertainment, commercial, industrial, and advanced research realms. We design, prototype and build everything from robotic fish to interactive toys, from intelligent indoor and outdoor robot platforms to autonomous tour guides, from robots that go down oil wells to animatronic museum installations.

Goal:
Security is crucial at our firm to protect our intellectual property. Security needs are constantly changing and therefore our solution needs to be capable of handling frequent changes, multiple interfaces and custom services. Our network is largely Linux based (many of our robots run Linux as well) and we make frequent use of open source software. Maintaining a several hundred line firewall script and changing it frequently had created an enormous administrative burden. The cost of making a mistake in this script is compromised security.

Solution:
After searching for the right tool, Firewall Builder has proved to be the perfect match. Generating the initial firewall rules to protect our internal networks from each other and from the internet was accomplished quite quickly. More importantly changes to the ruleset can be made almost immediately. Furthermore we always have the assurance that ultimately Firewall Builder generates an iptables script which we could edit by hand if we needed. It is worth noting this has never been necessary since implimenting firewall builder.

Conclusion:
Firewall Builder has proved itself to be a superior solution to both commercial firewalls and competing open source solutions we have tried. Through the use of firewall builder we have improved our efficiency and security.