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Personal firewalls actually don't work, and the reason is usability. iTunes has 6-12 different executables with different names that require approval. How is

by tsally 17y ago

Personal firewalls actually don't work, and the reason is usability. iTunes has 6-12 different executables with different names that require approval. How is your average personal going to tell whether a program with a strange name is part of iTunes or malware? Existing solutions do not address this problem. Also, users get asked to approve applications so much that they start to ignore the popups. One possible solution to this problem is to crowd source program analysis. The firewall popup would contain a rating system and user comments, and the user could make a decision from there. Security companies are making too much money off of crappy solutions at the moment to switch to this though.

sid 17y ago
Even firewalls in the enterprise corporate environment have the same problem. Network architects (well the bad ones anyway) know what they need to do to the firewall to achieve connectivity but dont know what security side effects those changes have thus rendering the firewall put in place to have no effect at all. This equates to 1000's upon 1000's of dollars spent simply to be rendered useless by silly decisions. I guess having said this the fault is more heavily placed on the user and not the equipment in this case. I think if you look at the plight of anti-sec the equipment and the software is as much to blame as the user controlling them in many of the cases
derefr 17y ago
> How is your average personal going to tell whether a program with a strange name is part of iTunes or malware? Personally, I think the OS should stop asking the user to authorize programs, and start asking to authorize companies (i.e. master per-company application signing certificates). You would get asked once that "Apple Corp." or "Adobe Inc." or "The GNU Foundation" would like to install something on your computer, and then it would be okay from then on. It would be alright to accept further products from the same company without confirmation because, if you stopped trusting the company, you'd stop trusting all their programs, and would thus uninstall everything by that company (i.e. under that signing cert) at once.

by tsally 17y ago

sid 17y ago

Even firewalls in the enterprise corporate environment have the same problem. Network architects (well the bad ones anyway) know what they need to do to the firewall to achieve connectivity but dont know what security side effects those changes have thus rendering the firewall put in place to have no effect at all. This equates to 1000's upon 1000's of dollars spent simply to be rendered useless by silly decisions. I guess having said this the fault is more heavily placed on the user and not the equipment in this case. I think if you look at the plight of anti-sec the equipment and the software is as much to blame as the user controlling them in many of the cases

derefr 17y ago

> How is your average personal going to tell whether a program with a strange name is part of iTunes or malware? Personally, I think the OS should stop asking the user to authorize programs, and start asking to authorize companies (i.e. master per-company application signing certificates). You would get asked once that "Apple Corp." or "Adobe Inc." or "The GNU Foundation" would like to install something on your computer, and then it would be okay from then on. It would be alright to accept further products from the same company without confirmation because, if you stopped trusting the company, you'd stop trusting all their programs, and would thus uninstall everything by that company (i.e. under that signing cert) at once.