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Internet
From what can be seen on many boards over the Internet it is clear that many users thinks that having such feature enabled improves the security of their computer. Let's have a look on technical aspects of this feature and shed some light on its security impact.
To understand how this works we need some basic knowledge about networking. There exists many network protocols. Probably the most known in public is TCP. It is used for many services, for example we can take email or web sites. Another well known protocol is UDP. This protocol is used for example for Domain Name System or streaming. Both protocols works over IP. There exists another protocol called ICMP on the same level as IP. This protocol is used for diagnostic or routing purposes.
Now, how is this info connected with the invisibility feature provided by personal firewalls? In fact the only thing these firewalls do to hide your computer on the network is that they disable responding to ICMP. There exists an ICMP request called Echo Request which is also known as ping.
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Ping is used to determine whether some host on the network is alive or not. When your firewall is set to hide your computer it just refuses to respond to ping attempts and thus it does not seem that your computer is alive.
Is this a security improvement? No! In fact disabling ICMP can only cause problems. There is no known bug in implementation of ICMP handling on current versions of major operating systems including Microsoft Windows. There is no sensitive information provided by standard ICMP handlers and thus it has no security impact to leave your machine response to ICMP correctly. Moreover, RFCs, sources of many Internet standards, that speak about ICMP strictly order every host in the network to respond to ICMP correctly. As mentioned above, ICMP is just a protocol for diagnostic or routing purposes. It is not true that with disabled ICMP you can not become a target of the attack of some Internet malware.
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