coverstory 8 Open Source Firewalls to Secure Your BUSINESS There are lots of freely available firewalls in the open source world, which provide enough features for basic network protection. Here are 8 worth checking out - Raj Kumar Maurya

here is a dark side of the internet which • Provides very secure stable and easily implementable is full of hackers and spammers and you upgrade and add on patches. must protect your business networks by Timplementing reliable firewalls. The developer 2. of security products and commercial firewalls are Shorewall or Shoreline is another very popular mostly built on an open source like Open source firewall specialized for GNU/. It is built Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. From tiny embedded upon the system built into the that security products to giant enterprise firewall all are using also supports IPV6. customized open source operating system as their base OS. There are dozens of open source firewall application available with community support. Here in this article, we’ve identified some most popular open source firewalls that can turned your commodity hardware in to full fledged Firewall system.

1. IPCop IPCop is an Open Source Linux firewall distribution, It is a stable, secure, user-friendly and highly configurable Firewall management system. IPCop provides a well- designed web interface to manage the firewall. It’s very Key Features useful and good for Small businesses and Local PCs. It • Tracking facilities for stateful packet filtering. can turn your Old PC as a secure VPN to provide a secure • Centralized firewall Administration. environment over the internet. • A GUI interface with control Panel. • Multiple ISP support. • Supports Masquerading, VPN, and port forwarding.

3. & Smoothwall Express Smoothwall Express is based on the Linux operating system. Smoothwall is configured via a web-based GUI and requires absolutely no knowledge of Linux to install or use. A freely distributable version of SmoothWall is knows as SmoothWall Express.

Key Features • Supports a wide variety of network cards, modems, and other hardware Key Features • Real Time content filtering • Monitor and show the performance Graphics for CPU, • Manage and configure the using a web Memory, and Disk as well as Network throughput. browser • Provide logs. • Run efficiently on older, cheaper hardware • Multiple language support. • Develop a supportive user community

48 PCQuest March 2016 pcquest.com twitter.com/pcquest facebook.com/pcquest linkd.in/pcquest [email protected] community also took care of Security and developed it as a Stateful Packet Inspection(SPI) firewall.

• Traffic stats management on per IP, interfaces and visit basis • Backup and restoration facility like. Key Features • Can be deployed as a firewall, a proxy or a VPN 4. pfSense gateway. pfSense is a very reliable firewall for FreeBSD servers. Its • Content filtering based on the concept of Stateful Packet filtering. It offers • Inbuilt Intrusion detection system wide ranges of feature which you might be found only in • Supports through Wiki, forums and Chats some expensive commercial firewalls only. • Support hypervisors like KVM, VmWare, and for Virtualization environment.

6. Endian is another Stateful packet Inspection concept based firewall which can be deployed as routers, proxy and Gateway VPN with OpenVPN. Its originally developed from IPCop firewall which is also a fork of Smoothwall.

Key Features • Highly configurable and upgraded from its Web – based interface. • Can be deployed as a perimeter firewall, , DHCP & DNS server. • Configured as wireless access point and a VPN endpoint. Key Features • Traffic shaping and Real Time information about the • Bidirectional firewall server. • Snort Intrusion prevention • Inbound and Outbound load balancing. • Can secure with HTTP &FTP proxies, antivirus and URL blacklist. 5. IPFire • Can secure Mail servers with SMTP and POP3 proxies, IPFire is another open source Linux based firewalls for Spam Auto-learning, Greylisting. Small Office, Home Office (SOHO) environments. Its • VPN with IPSec designed with modularity and highly flexibility. IPfire • Real-time Network traffic logging pcquest.com twitter.com/pcquest facebook.com/pcquest linkd.in/pcquest [email protected] March 2016 PCQuest 49 coverstory

7. ConfigServer Security Firewall 8. VyOS Configserver security and firewall is a cross platform and VyOS is a community fork of , a distribution a very versatile Firewall, it’s also based on the concept discontinued in 2013. It is a of Stateful packet inspection (SPI) Firewall. It supports that provides software-based network , firewall almost all Virtualization environments like Virtuozzo, and VPN functionality. VyOS is based on GNU/ OpenVZ, VMware, XEN, KVM and Virtualbox. Linux and is completely free and open-source. Its features include the ability to run on both physical and virtual platforms, and support for para-virtual drivers and integration packages for virtual platforms.

Key Features Key Features • Task scheduler • Can be easily integrated with popular web hosting • SNMP control panels like cPanel, DirectAdmin, and Webmin. • Configuration versioning and remote archiving • Notifies excessive resource user and suspicious • Event handling process via email alerts. • Remote Syslog • Intrusion detection system. • Web proxy with some URL filtering support (no HTTPS • Checks for exploits. filtering) and more.

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