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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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The might be a dumb question but... if I enable IP forwarding/routing on my Linux machine without any firewall enabled... (hexbear.net)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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can someone else use my machine as a router to forward traffic to anywhere else on the internet?

I'm not entirely sure what the security implications of that would even be if true but probably nothing good

I don't have any other routes in my routing table other than my "default" route and this machine is reachable via a globally routable IPv4 address. Also I think there are probably other machines on the same subnet (cloud VPS)

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Ohh that's true, I didn't think about that. It would be difficult to route anything through it unless you were connected directly to it with nothing in-between because no other router would forward packets destined for somewhere else to my machine (except maybe in the extremely unlikely case of source routing?). It seems obvious now lol, thank you!

I'll write some firewall rules just in case