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    Safer @ Home with pfSense®
    Safer @ Home with pfSense®
    Safer @ Home with pfSense®
    Ebook90 pages1 hour

    Safer @ Home with pfSense®

    By Michael Lines

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    About this ebook

    You don't need to risk your security and privacy on consumer-grade security products any longer.

     

    Book Description
    pfSense® is a powerful, commercial-grade firewall that provides capabilities far beyond what you can get in consumer products. This book will walk you through setting up your pfSense® firewall with many easy to follow recipes to choose from, depending on your needs.

     

    What you will learn
    * Blocking malware, phishing and malicious sites and countries
    * Hiding your DNS traffic from ISP snooping
    * Reducing the burden that advertising has on your browsing
    * Isolating your vulnerable IoT devices using VLANs
    * Setting up your firewall to provide you reports on matters that need your attention
    * Resolving buffer bloat to maximize your internet connection
    * Enabling remote access using VPNs
    * Managing, documenting, updating and backing up your firewall configuration

     

    Who this book is for
    This book is for those with an introductory understanding of networking, at least networking terms such as subnets. Prior knowledge of firewalls would be helpful but is not required. Most important is a desire and willingness to "get your hands dirty", in both setting up your firewall and understanding how to utilize it to protect your home and business.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael Lines
    Release dateJul 19, 2020
    ISBN9781393515890
    Safer @ Home with pfSense®
    Author

    Michael Lines

    Michael is an information security/risk executive and consultant, with a 20-year track record as a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), advisory Information Security practice leader, and information security/risk consultant. He writes, blogs, presents, speaks, and provides interviews on a wide variety of information security topics, primarily concerning what it takes to develop and run effective information security programs, and why so many companies continue to suffer security breaches due to ineffective programs.

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      Book preview

      Safer @ Home with pfSense® - Michael Lines

      INTRODUCTION

      This book is intended for technically inclined individuals who want to protect their security and privacy from internet related threats. The protection that consumer-grade routers or WiFi access points provide is often limited at best. In many cases, these products are nothing more than primitive routers doing network address translation (NAT) to hide the devices on the individual’s local network devices from the internet. The functionality of these devices is limited, their performance abysmal, and their security even worse¹. When vulnerabilities are detected in these products, the purchaser is unlikely to be informed of their existence, assuming the vendor even bothers to release a patch².

      There are alternatives that provide true business-grade capabilities for the more hands-on individual, and that do not cost an arm and a leg. These are the software and hardware appliances from Netgate. Netgate’s pfSense® is the industry leader in open source firewall software, with over 1 million deployments worldwide to consumers, businesses, educational institutions, and governments. There is an active and free online support community³ available to help individuals configure and use the pfSense® software, as well as paid support and professional services available for businesses.

      In this book, I will describe how to set up Netgate’s SG-1100 appliance⁴ to secure a typical consumer (or small business) network. While my recommendations assume that you have an SG-1100 appliance, these recipes are just as applicable to any other Netgate appliance or even your own firewall if you have built it using an old PC and the free pfSense® community edition software⁵.

      How this book is structured

      This book is organized as a series of recipes, where each recipe solves a particular security or privacy problem. After you have set up your SG-1100 following the instructions under "Recipe One - The basic ingredients", which recipe you choose to apply next is up to you based on your needs. If a recipe has a dependency on another recipe being performed first, I will let you know.

      About the SG-1100

      The SG-1100 is Netgate’s lowest end appliance, yet even at that is still delivers more performance than most consumer-grade routers. It is compact, silent, and power-efficient, and for internet connections up to around 500 Megabits per second (Mbs), it will be all that you need. Please note, that if you are running a gigabit fiber connection into your home, or if you wish to run more packages than are described in this book, you will need to upgrade to a more powerful appliance in Netgate’s product line, or build your firewall using the pfSense® community edition software⁶.

      Out of the box, the SG-1100 with a basic NAT configuration is far ahead of most consumer-grade routers in terms of performance and security capabilities. If you are worried that the SG-1100 is not powerful enough, rest assured that it is perfectly capable of supporting all the recipes in this book concurrently as long as your connection speed is not above the limit mentioned above.

      Who this book is for

      This book is for you those familiar with IP networking, who like to get their hands dirty, and who are willing to experiment. If this is not you, don’t feel bad, as this describes the vast majority of electronics buyers.

      In that case, a good consumer router, as insufficient as I believe them to be, is your best choice. My recommendation for anyone in this case is to look at the products from Eero. While Eero’s products have nowhere near the capabilities of pfSense® as firewalls or routers, for most consumers they are plug and play and will serve their needs.

      Command conventions

      There are tons of configuration options in pfSense® to choose from, and in this book, we will just be scratching the surface of what you can do. To understand what you need to do to execute my instructions, I will use the following convention when I am describing navigation within pfSense®, as well as for entering information.

      Navigation within the pfSense® webpage will follow the convention of: / / . For example, if I want you to go to the firewall rules page to enter a particular rule for the WAN interface, I will show the navigation path you need to follow as Firewall / Rules / WAN.

      Once you are on a pfSense® page and I need you to either enter information, click a button or select an option in a field, I will refer to the item on the page by displaying it in bold, for example, Bandwidth. The information or option itself that I want you to enter into that field I will show in quotes, such as 100. Enter the information without the quotes.

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