Enhanced Privacy



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Enhanced Privacy

Privacy is of great concern to certain sites, since what would normally be considered innocuous information might actually contain clues that would be useful to an attacker. Using a firewall, some sites wish to block services such as finger and Domain Name Service. finger displays information about users such as their last login time, whether they've read mail, and other items. But, finger could leak information to attackers about how often a system is used, whether the system has active users connected, and whether the system could be attacked without drawing attention.

Firewalls can also be used to block DNS information about site systems, thus the names and IP addresses of site systems would not be available to Internet hosts. Some sites feel that by blocking this information, they are hiding information that would otherwise be useful to attackers.



John Wack
Thu Feb 9 18:17:09 EST 1995