blueberry wrote:And to rehash my idea of MD5, i'm not looking for the thing to run
on a fileserver or compileserver, but on my firewall box.
On that box, having MD5's calculated wouldn't hurt me at all.
Yes, it'd probably take 2 more minutes to boot, but then again i'm not
rebooting it 6 times a day anyway...
Ok, there will be two conditions when your computer is running.
1) Kernel security is off. Without MD5, your binaries can be replaced. With MD5, they could just change the stored hashes. Either way, you're screwed. But if its _your_ firewall, why would it be off anyway, unless you turned it off?
2) Kernel security is on. Why check the signatures when you just make them read only in the first place? Don't let them get modified. Heck, on a firewall box, you could easily get away with making almost the whole thing read only.
Sample (incomplete) ACL:
/ rx
/var rwx
/var/log ar
/firewall/logs ar
Every binary in the system would be protected against overwriting or trojaning, as long as security is on. When security is off, MD5 won't help anyway.