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Security Portal: Ask Buffy – “owning” Apache, listing of port numbers and stateful firewalls

“This week we discuss IPSec issues; an FTP client that supports
SSL; “owning” Apache; EML extensions; listing of port numbers;
connecting a Linux machine to the Internet; and stateful
firewalls.”

“Who should own Apache? I have nobody as the owner and the
group, but I’m not sure if this is safe or not….”

“I have had a discussion with a colleague about different types
of firewalls. He scorned at my mentioning the Linux ipchains and
said that ipchains is a stateless firewall, meaning (I figured)
that a stateful firewall is more secure since it can trace
individual connections instead of individual packets. I can
understand the advantage of a stateful firewall for doing things
like SSL in a load-balanced environment, but I do not see how it
improves security. Would you say that a stateful firewall is a more
secure technology (I am not talking about any particular
implementation), and if it is, why?”

Complete
Story

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