LabVIEW
Is it possible to build a firewall using labview??
There are several kinds of firewalls, for example:
(1) so called "personal firewall software" which applies some policies to incoming and outgoing ethernet traffic on the computer it is running.
(2) Dedicated hardware firewalls (having at least two ethernet interfaces) that enforce policies of traffic flowing across. These can be bridging, routing, or even be proxying.
LabVIEW does NOT have access to the low level packet structure (ethernet header, ip header, tcp header, etc.) and relies on the OS for routing decisions. LabVIEW only deals with TCP and UDP and only at a very high level. A firewall must also make decisions for e.g. ICMP, GRE, or other IP packets, must know the status of all TCP flags (SYN, ACK, URG, PSH, FIN, RST), must check for valid fragmentations, et., etc.. LabVIEW cannot do any typical firewall tasks unless you do most of your work with external routines. In this case, LabVIEW just provides the UI.
(Even simple ftp traffic would be quite complicated. For example the ports for the secondary data connections must be dynamically allowed based on information gleaned from the control connection, in this particular case the PORT command and the reply to the PASV command).
I would say the answer is NO! Not with the networking tools provided with LabVIEW alone.
With lots of work, you might be able to built a simple proxy server using LabVIEW, but this would seem quite useless... 😉
(1) so called "personal firewall software" which applies some policies to incoming and outgoing ethernet traffic on the computer it is running.
(2) Dedicated hardware firewalls (having at least two ethernet interfaces) that enforce policies of traffic flowing across. These can be bridging, routing, or even be proxying.
LabVIEW does NOT have access to the low level packet structure (ethernet header, ip header, tcp header, etc.) and relies on the OS for routing decisions. LabVIEW only deals with TCP and UDP and only at a very high level. A firewall must also make decisions for e.g. ICMP, GRE, or other IP packets, must know the status of all TCP flags (SYN, ACK, URG, PSH, FIN, RST), must check for valid fragmentations, et., etc.. LabVIEW cannot do any typical firewall tasks unless you do most of your work with external routines. In this case, LabVIEW just provides the UI.
(Even simple ftp traffic would be quite complicated. For example the ports for the secondary data connections must be dynamically allowed based on information gleaned from the control connection, in this particular case the PORT command and the reply to the PASV command).
I would say the answer is NO! Not with the networking tools provided with LabVIEW alone.
With lots of work, you might be able to built a simple proxy server using LabVIEW, but this would seem quite useless... 😉
