Firewall Wizards: Re: VLAN Security

[Carson Gaspar <carson () taltos org>]

--On Tuesday, June 08, 2004 10:18:02 -0700 Jeff Boles <bolesjb () yahoo com> 
wrote:
> Anyone care to voice their consensus on contemporary
> VLAN implementations as a security measure?  I'm
I'm sort of a heretic in this crowd. I think VLANs are a very useful 
security implementation tool. That doesn't mean I trust them completely. My 
policy is "one chassis, one trust level" -  i.e. I will put 20 different 
business counterparties on a single (pair of) switch chassis, each on their 
own VLAN, but I'd never put internal or Internet exposed networks on that 
same chassis.
The risk acceptance question is "how screwed are we if something causes the 
switch to become one big flat network?". For now, ignore how this can 
happen (bugs, operator error, sabotage, ...) - the important thing is that 
it _can_ happen.
So in the above example, in the worst case scenario, I've allowed vendor A 
to use me as a transit net to attack vendor B. *shrug* I've made sure we're 
not liable by working with the lawyers, and any vendor that doesn't have 
their own firewall on their side has little pity from me.
--
Carson

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