Multiple NICs verses multipl VLANs...

The on going thread "Lets talk about firewalls" has brought up the fact that people believe there should be multiple NICs in a firewall. I'm not arguing with that fact.

However I do question whether or not these need to be physical interfaces, or if they can be logical (VLAN) interfaces. What if you are running a network where you are using ATM or Frame Relay. Do these logical interfaces suffice just as well as physical interfaces? This is of course presuming that you can ensure that no one will be on a VLAN that should not be, which is fairly trivial in a properly configured network.

Grant. . . .

Reply to
Taylor, Grant
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Most VLAN implementations are not trimmed for security, so frames might unintentionally leak from one VLAN to another by Ethernet broadcasts, MAC spoofing etc.

Those are usually link-to-link, whereas Ethernet is a multilink connection with broadcasts, so it usually already is a dedicated physical interface (f.e. an Ethernet-to-ATM switch on the border gateway).

As stated above, it depends on whether your trivial proper configuration can be trivially circumvented.

Reply to
Sebastian Gottschalk

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