Grimes article on firewalls
It’s always interesting when an article or blog post generates multiple responses from the security blogosphere. It lets us gauge the general opinion of that particular idea or concept. It wasn’t different with this post from Roger Grimes, “Why you don’t need a firewall”. It sounds very similar to the general rationale for the Jericho project, but those guys have clearly stated that the firewall doesn’t have to be removed, but it assumes a smaller role in the new security strategy.
There are similar opinions about the article here, here, here and here. Some different spins, but the general understanding is that the firewall is not a silver bullet, but it has its use. The most important thing to consider when assessing the firewall value is to understand the value of choke points:
In military strategy, a choke point (or chokepoint) is a geographical feature on land such as a valley, defile or a bridge, or at sea such as a strait which an armed force is forced to pass, sometimes on a substantially narrower front, and therefore greatly decreasing its combat power, in order to reach its objective. A choke point would allow a numerically inferior defending force to successfully prevent a larger opponent because the attacker would not be able to bring his superior numbers to bear.
Firewalls are also valuable enablers of other security tools, such as IPS/IDS and deep package inspection systems. Deploying those systems behind firewalls reduce the amount of data to be inspected and the number of events generated for investigation, reducing capital (hardware) and operational (people) costs for those controls. There are some decent metrics out there for sizing deployments of those tools based on the amount of traffic being monitored, so it should be straightforward to factor them into a cost/benefit analysis for firewalls.
One can argue that we should also consider the additional costs from the firewall deployment itself, but the controls above are just one example of things that will cost less because of (well managed) firewalls. Those reductions sum up to a point where not having firewalls is just a very bad business decision.