BrickHouse

BrickHouse is designed to make using the network firewall built in to Mac OS X quick and easy. By using BrickHouse to enable your computer's firewall, you can help prevent unauthorized villians from gaining access to your computer via your internet connection.

BrickHouse also helps you use your firewall to guard against denial of service or resource-based internet attacks. Network attacks will bounce off the firewall to prevent your computer from slowing down or crashing.

While Mac OS X is fairly secure as installed, it also includes a powerful network traffic filter or firewall that can both prevent break-in attempts and keep your computer from being used in attack on another computer. Unfortunately, the default installation leaves it wide open, and you must manually 'add rules' or filters using a command line tool called ipfw. You need to use Terminal.app to do this. My mom isn't going to be able to do this.

That's where BrickHouse comes in. BrickHouse provides a simple and easy interface to setting and activating your firewall's filters. It also includes a firewall monitor window to allow you to see how often each filter is used. Filter settings can be saved and switched quickly, and imported and exported to and from disk. Settings can be created by knowledgeable users and admins, and distributed to others to disable specific or recently discovered attack techniques.

Reviews
BrickHouse 1.b6 review on SecureMac.com
BrickHouse 1.1b5 review on Tucows.com

View ScreenShot

Release Notes

1.1b6 10/7/2001
Built for OSX 10.1. Many new features and bug fixes. See the ReadMe file for complete details.

1.1b5 6/4/2001
New interface. New Features: Ability to configure PPPoE and AirPort or second ethernet cards on multi-homed machines. Flexible rule ordering, easy custom rule editor, many more canned filters including many common attacks and trojan horses. New Setup Assistant. IP Sharing/NAT configuration and control. Ability to create several different internal subnets to allow the use of DMZ's. Redirection of certain incoming traffic to internal local machines running public services.

1.1b1 - 1.1b4 5/1/2001 - 6/2/2001
Private releases to beta test group. Full list of changes under 1.1b5.

1.0.2SE 5/15/2001
Special Edition for WWDC 2001. Replaces RPC Quick setting with Andrew File System.

1.0.2 4/12/2001
Improved generated firewall rules to properly allow outgoing traffic in restrictive configurations, added 'Remove Startup Script' option. Also added beginnings of a FAQ, and an important tip for PPPoE users.

1.0.1 3/28/2001
Fixed sporadic app crasher when zeroing monitor rule counts. Changed window title to indicate configuration mode, added iDisk label to AppleShare option. Added missing additional import filters. Added additional documentation.

1.0 Final 3/23/2001
Made numerous changes for compatibility with release version of OS X 1.0. New features include: Improved Monitor window, customizable toolbars, Security framework support, support for SMB/Samba port rules and the firewall denial log. Experimental support for dynamic NetInfo/NFS port rules.

1.0b 4 1/14/2001
Fixed possible crashing bug that appeared when creating Startup File and running BrickHouse as root.

1.0b3 11/2/2000
Removed rsh, rlogin and exec quick config options and replaced them with DNS, finger and talk since they're much more likely to be needed by regular people. Unix-savvy users who need the removed options should be able to use the Expert settings screen to do so. Fixed a minor issue with the bootp and ntp rules and removed an overly-restrictive default rule that could prevent desired incoming connections in some cases. Fabulous new full-color icon!

1.0b2 10/22/2000
I discovered a configuration issue with restricting the outgoing traffic in computer lab setups, and a cosmetic issue with resizing the Monitor window shortly after I released BrickHouse 1.0b1. Also found and fixed an application crasher that could occur while monitoring the firewall when logged into the computer as the root user.

1.0b1 10/19/2000
Initial release.

Registration

BrickHouse is a shareware product.
The cost is $25 per machine.

I'm of the opinion that people will either pay shareware fees, or they won't.
You may use BrickHouse without registering it until you feel that it is worth $25 to you.

If you like BrickHouse, you should pay the shareware fee to help ensure future development of the product.

Please visit my order page to register BrickHouse.

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