New Linux Firewall Releases: IPCop 1.4.0 and Devil-Linux 1.2

Although much less glamorous than the desktop or server distributions, Linux-based firewalls have proven themselves as reliable workhorses capable of turning many an old computer into useful appliances, guarding corporate and home networks from bad elements traversing the cyberspace. Among them, IPCop Firewall and Devil-Linux are just two examples of the power behind collaborative efforts of developers across the Internet. Both projects provide simple, yet powerful products contributing to greater peace of mind in our ever more complex, inter-connected world of computers.

IPCop 1.4.0

IPCop Firewall, launched in 2001 as a fork of SmoothWall, is developed by Charles Williams and a small group of developers who found themselves disenchanted with the attitude of some of the SmoothWall developers on their support forums. Starting with the recently released version 1.4.0, IPCop is now built from ground up and based on Linux From Scratch. The developer's mission is simple: to provide a free, stable and secure Linux firewall that is highly configurable and easy to maintain. With some of the press reviews rating IPCop higher than certain expensive commercial firewall products, the IPCop developers have certainly succeeded in achieving their goal.

The size of the IPCop ISO image, at 40 MB, leaves little doubt about the specialist nature of this distribution. It offers packet filtering, VPNs, a caching web proxy, DNS, DHCP and time server, traffic shaping, and intrusion detection, but not much else. System administration is done through a web browser over the network using a secure connection. IPCop is designed to run on a dedicated box with as little as 300 MB of hard disk space and 32 MB of RAM, but it can also be installed on a compact flash card and run as a network appliance. The sophisticated web-based configuration interface provides many useful functions, including password modification and secure shell access settings, firewall and VPN configuration, and management of services. Security updates and fixes can also be installed through the web interface.

IPCop 1.4.0 is the project's first stable release in 18 months. A lot of work has gone into this version, which is now available for both i386 and Alpha processors. Hardware support has been extended considerably to include more network cards, USB and PCI DSL modems, as well as SCSI and PCMCIA hardware. ACPI and multi-processor systems are now also supported. In terms of new software, Snort has been included for intrusion detection and most packages are now compiled with the GCC Stack Smashing Protector. The web-based interface has been redesigned, offering enhanced log viewing, DHCP and host editing, as well as newly introduced system performance graphs. This version of IPCop has excellent multi-lingual capabilities, inclusive of some exotic languages, such as Hungarian and Vietnamese.

Devil-Linux 1.2

Devil-Linux started as a personal project of Heiko Zuerker in early 2001. It departed from the established ways of developing a Linux distributions in that Devil-Linux was a live CD, meant to be run directly from a bootable CD-ROM. As such, argued the lead developer, it offered more security, simply because it ran from a read-only file system. Therefore, certain common cracking techniques, such as installing a rootkit on the target machine for cracking passwords, were not available to intruders. Many users found this technique intriguing and Devil-Linux matured into a popular distribution.

The scope of Devil-Linux is a lot broader than that of IPCop. Besides the usual firewall and router software, Devil-Linux also ships with a web server (Apache 2 + MySQL + PHP), mail server with TLS support and spam and virus filtering (Postfix TLS + SpamAssassin + ClamAV), FTP server (vsftpd), and a number of other server applications. However, all services, including networking, are turned off by default. System configuration is accomplished via a ncurses-based menu. One of the most interesting features of this distribution is the ability to easily add or remove applications with the help of a Devil-Linux build kit, a well-documented procedure for customizing and building one's own live CD.

Devil-Linux 1.2 is the first major upgrade in a year. Besides kernel (2.4.27) and package version updates, there are several noteworthy security enhancements in this release - notably the Stack Smashing Protection for most binaries included on the CD, and the GRSecurity patch for the kernel, with chroot restrictions, address space modification protection, and randomization features. Additionally, Devil-Linux provides an easy way to setup chroot jails and supplies a number of Netfilter modules not found in the standard kernel.

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