FWTK The TIS Firewall Toolkit

The Firewall ToolKit (FWTK) is a complete application layer firewall package freely available on the Internet. FTWK can be compiled to run on a Linux server without any source code modifications. First released to the public back in 1993, FWTK was written by Trusted Information Systems (TIS), now part of Network Associates International, with funding from the U.S. government through the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Marcus Ranum, who is now a legendary figure in Internet security, spearheaded the FTWK development project. FWTK would eventually be the seed for the TIS Gauntlet, the first commercially available application layer proxy firewall product.

The goal of the FWTK project was to provide an integrated collection of proxy processes that would accept internal connections for popular services such as SMTP, Telnet, FTP, and HTTP and would then request the connection to the Internet host on behalf of the internal host. The basic framework was scalable and easily extensible, allowing for the simple addition of new proxies as new Internet services and applications became popular. The FWTK has been extremely popular during the last eight years; over 50,000 downloads from six continents have been registered.

Although the FWTK software is available in source code and is free, you are not permitted to distribute it or make it available to anyone else without written permission from TIS. However, you are allowed to use it and even modify it to suit your own needs, as long as you use it for non-commercial purposes and only internally in your company.

There are some valuable Web resources for FWTK, including the http://www.fwtk.org Web site (see Figure 11.1), which features Keith Young's informative (and up-to-date) FAQ. There is also a mailing list for FTWK discussion. To subscribe to this mailing list, send a message to [email protected] containing the text "subscribe fwtk-users" in the body of the message. After subscribing, you can send list messages to fwtk-[email protected].

Figure 11.1 FWTK information clearinghouse on the Web

Figure 11.1 FWTK information clearinghouse on the Web

Continue reading here: Installing the FWTK Firewall Toolkit

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