Douane personal firewall for GNU/Linux
I remember using this sort of applications on Windows (a very long time ago; those were the days of Windows 98, whose famous stability drove me to Linux and BSD). Can some of its users help me shed some light on the use case of such a program on an open source system? I mean:<p>- Signed packages from trusted repos <i>should</i> not need firewalling, at least not if you&#x27;re using a serious distro rather than a hobby project. This isn&#x27;t true in the general case, of course (hence things like OpenBSD&#x27;s auditing of base packages), but this is a personal firewall, it&#x27;s not exactly intended for server-grade equipment...<p>- If you install packages from dubious PPAs all over the Interwebs, a puny kernel module is unlikely to stop the two rootkits that you&#x27;ve probably already installed. Same for a system that has already been compromised.<p>- Untrusted applications (which you&#x27;re running straight on your system, rather than nicely tucked in a VM with no network access because...?) -- as practical experience on Android and Windows shows -- will generally break as soon as they can&#x27;t do their snooping because they&#x27;ll segfault or block waiting for the answer that never came to the package that was never sent anyway.<p>I see a lot of talk in the Linux desktop field about building lines of defense against untrusted programs. I see why this is relevant to users who are routinely running closed-source programs (no, I don&#x27;t personally audit every line of code running on my system, but a public source code repository is sort of a stupid place to hide malicious code when there&#x27;s so much <i>fully closed</i> code being purchased from &quot;app&quot; stores and downloaded from all over the web and whatnot). I find it hard to understand why it would be relevant on an open source desktop.<p>Things like Wayland&#x27;s sandboxing, I get to some degree -- it&#x27;s only a matter of time before JavaScript code in a browser will get access to <i>more</i> stuff from your computer, which will eventually include stuff like keystrokes and mouse events and whatnot, so it&#x27;ll have to be properly sandboxed. But why a personal firewall? What sort of applications do you find yourself wanting to block, and <i>why</i> for heaven&#x27;s sake are you running them on your Linux computer, when it&#x27;s really 2017 and there&#x27;s plenty of choice in terms of applications.