Firewalls as a security risk

In Firewall Follies, Simson Garfinkel says firewalls are disasters waiting to happen, in large part because they do nothing to protect an enterprise's information assets from inside attacks:

Organizations that rely on their firewalls build networks with hard, crunchy outsides but soft, creamy insides.

Worse, he writes, they degrade over time:

Here's what typically happens: Somebody inside an organization needs to send some sort of information through the firewall -- perhaps because the company is involved in a joint project with another firm. To allow this transfer, a supposedly temporary hole is opened in the firewall. But that hole invariably remains in place long after it is no longer needed. After a few years, the typical firewall comes to resemble Swiss cheese.

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