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1. Introduction

1.1 What is GuardDog?

GuardDog is a KDE based utility for maintaining an IP-chains based firewall on a Linux system.

1.2 What is a firewall and why do I need one?

A firewall is a software and/or hardware tool for defending a computer from network based attacks performed by malicious or curious computer users. A firewall protects by limiting which outside computers can connect to, and use your computer. It does this by limiting and filtering the network communication between your computer and the internet at large.

With the avent of fast, permanent, 24 hour/7 day, internet connections for home users, your computer is now exposed to constant attacks from anywhere in the world. You may ask yourself "why would anyone want to break into my computer? I don't have anything important". Actually you do, even a home computer stores usernames and passwords for connecting to the internet, personal email, possibly financial information and perhaps even credit card information. Even without these things, your computer can be used as a stepping stone by malicious users (often called 'crackers') to attack other computers. The worst part of this is that these further attacks will look like they are coming from you!

1.3 Why use GuardDog?

First I should explain which group of users GuardDog was intended for. GuardDog is suited for people who use thier computer for client tasks like surfing the web, email, using chat programs like ICQ etc. It is currently not suitable for machines which need to acts a gateway or network router. There are already plenty of ipchains based scripts and tools for 'power' configurations.

Specifically, GuardDog is aimed at two groups of users. Novice to intermediate users who are not experts in TCP/IP networking and security, and those users who don't want the hastle of dealing with cryptic shell scripts and ipchains parameters.

1.4 Changes

* June 11th 2000 Simon Edwards simon@simonzone.com

0.9.1 release. Packaged with RPM for Mandrake 7.1 (should also work with Redhat). Some display glitch fixes, still more remain, grrr. Should now be able to find the protocol database file ok. Sorry to those people who tried to get it to run from source and failed. Uses sane defaults for checkboxes in new firewalls.

* June 2nd 2000 Simon Edwards simon@simonzone.com

0.9 Initial developer release.


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