ISS X-Force Security Advisories on Checkpoint Firewall-1 and VPN-1

Martin Hepworth martinh at solid-state-logic.com
Thu Feb 5 17:41:25 UTC 2004


Alexei Roudnev wrote:
> Checkpoint is a very strange brand. On the one hand, it is _well known
> brand_, _many awards_, _editors choice_, etc etc. I know network consultant,
> who installed few hundred of them, and it works.
> 
> On the other hand, every time, when I have a deal with this beasts (we do
> not use them, but some our customers use), I have an impression, that it is
> the worst firewall in the world:
> - for HA, you need very expansive Solaris cluster (compare with PIX-es) /I
> can be wrong, but it is overall opinion/.
> - to change VPN, you must reapply all policy, causing service disruption (I
> saw  1 day outage due to unsuccesfull Checkpoint reconfiguration);
> - VPN have numerous bugs (it is not 100% compatible with Cisco's by default;
> of couse, I can blame Cisco, but Checkpoint is _the only_ one of my peers
> which have this problem);
> - Configuration is not packed in 1 single file, so making difficult change
> control, etc etc...
> 
> All this is _very_ subjective, of course; but - those customers, who uses
> Checkpoints, are the only ones who had a problems with firewalls. If I
> compare it with plain, reliable and _very simple_ PIX (PIX is not state of
> art, of course) and some others... I begin to think about checkpoint as
> about one more _brand bubble_. At least, I always advice _against_ it.
> 
> PS. Security for dummies... interesting idea. Unfortunately, this book
> should start with _100% secure computer = dead computer_ -:)
> Why not? People really need such book!

Of course 'back in days' when Firewall-1 started and 
firewalls at greatcircle.com was *the* network security ML, PIX was an 
utter pile of poo and F-1 was very nice thankyou.

Now PIX is quite good, and Firewall-1 has become the Microsoft of 
firewalls - ie everywhere and not particularly well administratored.

Interesting how things change isn't it?


-- 
Martin Hepworth
Snr Systems Administrator
Solid State Logic
Tel: +44 (0)1865 842300


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