10/1/08

Happy Anniversary Firewall ToolKit!

The TIS FWTK was delivered via FTP to DARPA 15 years ago today. The next day we delivered it to DUNSnet. We did change the firewall industry with its delivery. And then we changed firewall pricing as Steve Walker and I, doing a “back of the envelope” SWAG decided on $15K for software only, $18K with hardware. Other vendors, with pricing at over $50K dropped their prices within a week.

Best wishes to its daddy, Marcus Ranum.

It’s still the most fun I had in a job, my own consulting gig a close second.

Read something historic at Firewall TookKit.

As early as v1.0, the firewall toolkit had “application intelligence,” also known as “application awareness,” and “deep packet inspection.” We just weren’t marketing guys.

3 comments:

Unknown said…

Is there anywhere you can pick up a copy of it nowadays?

Fred Avolio said…

Google is your friend. 🙂

I looked at www.fwtk.org, but the downloads link is broken. But, when I searched for fwtk.tar.Z, I found http://www.fwtoolkit.net/fwtk/download/dist/.

Use at your own risk. I.e., read the source before using it as a security gateway.

Unknown said…

Thanks. After I left that note, I found:
http://ftp.eu.openbsd.org/pub/security/tools/net/fwtk/
http://www.theargon.com/achilles/firewalls/fwtk/
http://www.imasy.or.jp/~ppume/ipv6/
http://www.cpu.lu/~mlan/ftp/
http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/dist/ipf/FWTK/
etc.

So, while you can’t get it in the “traditional” way as stated on the fwtk.org site (i.e., register via email and download from their ftp server), there appear to be plenty of copies of it around still.