VMWindows backdoor 1474

So anyway, it was like, 18:20 CEST May 30 2006, you know? Oh, and, yeah, Vilmos Soti was all like, "Dude,

If all it does is being a firewall, then I'd call it a hardware firewall since the hardware might as well be designed for that purpose alone (cf the Nokia IP series, for instance). The term is sort of incorrect tho, as you correctly point out that all firewalls do run software.

Dedicated firewall might indeed be a more descriptive term, at least it stresses the point that you don't run anything else on the hardware in question. Otherwise it's just a mail or web server that happens to be filtering traffic and sharing its connection to the Internet with other computers.

By running additional services on your firewall box, you're pretty much doing the same thing as when you put the firewall on your desktop, any software that can exploit a vulnerability in, for instance, the web server and gain some privilege might as well turn off the firewall as that virus you just triggered in (horror!) outlook.

Of course, there might be vulnerabilities in the firewall code as well, but if that's all you're running, the risks are, in fact, as low as they can possibly get.

-- 08:36:20 up 57 days, 19:30, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.15, 0.16 Linux 2.6.16.1 x8664 GNU-Linux Registered Linux user #261729