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Date:      Wed, 24 Nov 1999 17:31:30 -0500
From:      "Louis A. Mamakos" <louie@TransSys.COM>
To:        "Rodney W. Grimes" <rgrimes@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net>
Cc:        ahl@austclear.com.au (Tony Landells), ipfw@freebsd.org, arch@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: new IPFW 
Message-ID:  <199911242231.RAA21036@whizzo.transsys.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 24 Nov 1999 14:08:47 PST." <199911242208.OAA46490@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net> 
References:  <199911242208.OAA46490@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net> 

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> > [ using BPF for ipfw ]
> > 
> > One concern I would have with that is that there are a lot of tools
> > built on BPF that I would prefer to not be able to run on the firewall.
> > 
> > Well, to be more accurate, I'd love to be able to run them on the
> > firewall, but I don't want attackers to have access to them, and
> > the safest option is to not even have support in the kernel for them
> > (I can always plug in a separate sniffer if I really need it).
> 
> Non-issue.  The fcode engine is in net/bpf_filter.c, the bpf tapping
> routings that actually get packets to/from the cards is in net/bpf.c.
> 
> I din't mean to imply that the filtering should be done using the /dev/bpf
> interface, just that the engine code for filtering could be reused.

I've actually used the BFP engine for just such an application.  It was
on another platform (NeXTSTEP), and it was sorta a netgraph-like system,
but all in user space.  I used a BPF-based engine for such things as
"firewall" type filtering, as well as classifing traffic for dial-on-demand
and idle-timeout reset.

It worked quite well.  The one extension which would be valuable is more
an extension of the BPF expression compiler rather than the engine itself;
if would be valuable to be able to return a value from the BPF-engine
program so that it could be acted on.  The engine itself has this capability,
but the existing tcpdump intended expression compiler doesn't currently
have syntax to support it.

louie






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