Re: Proxy advantage

["Paul D. Robertson" <paul () compuwar net>]

Transparent proxy clients don't have a way to connect without DNS.  Fewer non-aware applications exist today than even 
5 years ago.  Hosts files can be maintained where that's an issue.  Good security requires work- it's hard isn't a good 
excuse in my book.  Engineer well and handle the exceptions, don't throw away your security by engineering for the poor 
exceptions.

As far as management- if you're going to whitelist some DNS servers, how difficult is it to log and investigate 
recursive resolution requests?  Rate of change is low, even in large environments.

For broken crappy software, either file bug reports or just set up a wildcard resolver for the clients- it doesn't 
really matter what you resolve it to since the proxy makes the connections anyway.

DNS tunneling is becoming vogue again- how else do you stop it?

Paul
--
President and Chairman, FluidIT Group
Moderator, Firewall-Wizards
http://pauldrobertson.net
http://pauldrobertson.com
@compuwar

On Apr 16, 2013, at 10:13, Kevin Kadow <kkadow () gmail com> wrote:

> Does this only apply to an explicit proxy server?   Does anybody deploy a transparent proxy server and not pass DNS 
> down to the client?
>
> Can you call it a "best practice" when it is impossible to maintain in a large diverse network?  Aside from 
> applications which are just not proxy aware, even when the application correctly uses OS proxy settings for 
> HTTP/HTTPS/FTP/etc, it may still rely on being able to resolve external names; result is an unmanageably large 
> whitelist for DNS lookups.
>
> Same goes with "not advertising a default route" or restricting default route HTTP/HTTPS with ACLs.  Great idea, but 
> one which quickly becomes difficult to manage on a large scale network.  Once you have any unproxyable applications 
> needing connectivity to Akamai or a similar CDN, these controls are usually abandoned as unmaintainable.
>
> Kevin Kadow
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