About:
Mason is a tool that interactively builds a firewall using Linux' ipfwadm or ipchains firewalling. You leave mason running on the firewall machine while you are making all the kinds of connections that you want the firewall to support (and want it to block). Mason gives you a list of firewall rules that exactly allow and block those connections. It can either build a firewall from scratch for you or supplement an existing firewall.

Author:
William Stearns [contact developer]

Rating:	reset 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
(not rated)

Homepage:
http://www.stearns.org/mason/
RPM package:
http://www.stearns.org/mason/mason-0.13.9.5-1.noarch.rpm

Trove categories: [change]

[Development Status]		5 - Production/Stable
[Environment]		Console (Text Based)
[Intended Audience]		End Users/Desktop, System Administrators
[License]		OSI Approved :: GNU General Public License (GPL)
[Operating System]		POSIX :: Linux
[Programming Language]		Unix Shell
[Topic]		Security, System :: Networking :: Firewalls

Dependencies: [change]
Shell-Accessible Module Library (required)
[download links]

 Branches

Branch	Version	Last release	License	URLs
Default	0.13.9.5	17-Sep-2001	GNU General Public License (GPL)

 Articles referencing this project

• Debian: New mason packages fix missing init script
  by Patrick Lenz , in Security
  Thu, Oct 6th 2005 11:13
  

 Comments

[»] Use of Mason
by Charlie Peppler - Jan 19th 2000 16:12:26

I had heard about a couple of horror stories about folks hooking a Linux box up to Mediaone RoadRunner, and knew I needed a firewall. I had an old Win95 '486 box (24MB RAM, 400MB HD) that I wanted use as the firewall box. I bought a couple of NIC cards (LNE 2000/Linksys), dropped them in the box, and loaded RedHat Linux 6.1. After checking a couple of options, I found Mason. I called Mediaone, changed my MAC address, and brought up Linux on Mediaone. I set the IP_MASQ rule up, and had access to Mediaone from my internal LAN through the new (old) '486. Not wanting the crackers to get in, I started up Mason, and watched it make a bunch of ipchains rules as I used the various applications from inside my home LAN. I saw a couple of scans from outside boxes, changed those rules from ACCEPT to DENY, and set the default rules policy to DENY on input. So far, things have been running great. The mason-gui-text user interface is functional, and works fine on the text console. So far, I've been very pleased with Mason (developer version 0.13.0.92), and would recommend it to others. I had heard stories about folks getting their Mediaone access suspended because of crackers using their open Linux box, so this tool definitely helps.

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