I’ve spent some time searching this question, but I have yet to find a satisfying answer. The majority of answers that I have seen state something along the lines of the following:

  1. “It’s just good security practice.”
  2. “You need it if you are running a server.”
  3. “You need it if you don’t trust the other devices on the network.”
  4. “You need it if you are not behind a NAT.”
  5. “You need it if you don’t trust the software running on your computer.”

The only answer that makes any sense to me is #5. #1 leaves a lot to be desired, as it advocates for doing something without thinking about why you’re doing it – it is essentially a non-answer. #2 is strange – why does it matter? If one is hosting a webserver on port 80, for example, they are going to poke a hole in their router’s NAT at port 80 to open that server’s port to the public. What difference does it make to then have another firewall that needs to be port forwarded? #3 is a strange one – what sort of malicious behaviour could even be done to a device with no firewall? If you have no applications listening on any port, then there’s nothing to access. #4 feels like an extension of #3 – only, in this case, it is most likely a larger group that the device is exposed to. #5 is the only one that makes some sense; if you install a program that you do not trust (you don’t know how it works), you don’t want it to be able to readily communicate with the outside world unless you explicitly grant it permission to do so. Such an unknown program could be the door to get into your device, or a spy on your device’s actions.

If anything, a firewall only seems to provide extra precautions against mistakes made by the user, rather than actively preventing bad actors from getting in. People seem to treat it as if it’s acting like the front door to a house, but this analogy doesn’t make much sense to me – without a house (a service listening on a port), what good is a door?

  • KalciferOP
    2•10 months ago

    If you’re running a laptop with a local web server for development, you wouldn’t want other devices in i.e. the coffee shop WiFi to be able to connect to your (likely insecure) local web server, would you?

    This is a fair point that I hadn’t considered for the mobile use-case.

    Imagine a family member visits you and wants internet access in their Windows laptop, so you give them the WiFi password. Do you want that possibly malware infected thing poking around at ports other than 80 running on your server?

    Fair point!

    note that you likely do have applications listening on ports you didn’t know about. Take a look at sudo ss -utpnl.

    Interesting! In my case I have a number of sockets from spotify, and steam listening on port 0.0.0.0. I would assume, that these are only available to connections from the LAN?

    It’s rather the other way around; you don’t want the outside world to be able to talk to untrusted software on your computer. To be a classical “door”, the application must be able to listen to connections.

    OTOH, smarter malware can of course be something like a door by requesting intrusion by itself, so outbound filtering is also something you should do with untrusted applications.

    It could also be malicious software that simply makes a request to a remote server – perhaps even siphoning your local data.

    If it turned out your window could easily be opened from the outside, you’d rather have razor fence in front until you can replace the window, would you?

    Fair point!

    • Atemu
      2•10 months ago

      In my case I have a number of sockets from spotify, and steam listening on port 0.0.0.0. I would assume, that these are only available to connections from the LAN?

      That’s exactly the kind of thing I meant :)

      These are likely for things like in-house streaming, LAN game downloads and remote music playing, so you may even want to consider explicitly allowing them through the firewall but they’re also potential security holes of applications running under your user that you have largely no control over.

      • KalciferOP
        2•10 months ago

        These are likely for things like in-house streaming, LAN game downloads and remote music playing, so you may even want to consider explicitly allowing them through the firewall

        I looked up a few of the ports, and yeah an example of one of them was Steam Remote Play.