Linux per program firewall similar to windows and mac counterparts

1. Is it possible to create开发者_Go百科 GUI firewall that works as Windows and Mac counterparts? Per program basis. Popup notification window when specific program want to send\recv data from network.
2. If no, than why? What Linux kernel lacks to allow existence of such programs?
3. If yes, than why there aren't such program?

P.S. This is programming question, not user one.

1. Yes it's possible. You will need to setup firewall rules to route traffic through an userspace daemon, it'll involve quite a bit of work.
2. N/A
3. Because they're pretty pointless - if the user understands which programs he should block from net access he could just as well use one of multiple existing friendly netfilter/iptables frontends to configure this.

It is possible, there are no restrictions and at least one such application exists.

I would like to clarify a couple of points though.

If I understood this article correct, the firewalls mentioned here so far and iptables this question is tagged under are packet filters and accept and drop packets depending more on IP addresses and ports they come from/sent to.

What you describe looks more like mandatory access control to me. There are several utilities for that purpose in Linux - selinux, apparmor, tomoyo.

If I had to implement a graphical utility you describe, I would pick, for example, AppArmor, which supports whitelists, and, to some extent, dynamic profiling, and tried to make a GUI for it.

OpenSUSE's YaST features graphical interface for apparmor setup and 'learning' , but it is specific to the distribution.

So Linux users and administrators have several ways to control network (and files) access on per-application basis.

Why the graphical frontends for MAC are so few is another question. Probably it's because Linux desktop users tend to trust software they install from repositories and have less reasons to control them this way (if an application is freely distributed, it has less reasons to call home and packages are normally reviewed before they get to repositories) while administrators and power users are fine with command line.

As desktop Linux gets more popular and people install more software from AUR or PPA or even from gnome-look.org where packages and scripts are not reviewed that accurately (if at all) a demand for such type of software (user-friendly, simple to configure MAC) might grow.

To answer your 3rd point. There is such a program which provides zenity popups, it is called Leopard Flower: http://sourceforge.net/projects/leopardflower

1. Yes. Everything is possible
2. -
3. There are real antiviruses for linux, so there could be firewalls with GUI also. But as a linux user I can say that such firewall is not needed.

I reached that Question as i am currently trying to migrate from a Mac to Linux. There are a lot of applications I run on my Mac and on my Linux PC. Some of them I trust fully. But others I am not fully trusting. If they are installed from a source that checks them or not, do i have to trust them because someone else did? No, I am old enough to choose myself.

In times where privacy is getting more and more complicate to achieve, and Distributions exist that show that we should not trust everyone, I like to be in control of what my applications do. This control might not end at the connection to the network/Internet but it is what this question (and mine is about.

I have used LittleSnitch for MacOSX in the past years and I was surprised how often an application likes to access the internet without me even noticing. To check for updates, to call home, ...

Now where i would like to switch to Linux, I tried to find the same thing as I want to be in control of what leaves my PC.

During my research I found a lot of questions about that topic. This one, in my opinion, best describes what it is about. The question for me is the same. I want to know when an application tries to send or receive information over the network/internet.

Solutions like SELinux and AppAmor might be able to allow or deny such connections. Configuring them means a lot of manual configuration and does not inform when a new application tries to connect somewhere. You have to know which application you want to deny access to the network.

The existence of Douane (How to control internet access for each program? and DouaneApp.com) show that there is a need for an easy solution. There is even a Distribution which seems to have such a feature included. But i am not sure what Subgraph OS (subgraph.com) is using, but they state something like this on there website. It reads exactly like the initial question: "The Subgraph OS application firewall allows a user to control which applications can initiate outgoing connections. When an unknown application attempts to make an outgoing connection, the user will be prompted to allow or deny the connection on a temporary or permanent basis. This helps prevent malicious applications from phoning home."

As it seems to me, there are only two options at the moment. One is to Compiling Douane manually mysqlf or two, switch distribution to Subgraph OS. As one of the answers state, everything is possible - So i am surprised there is no other solution. Or is there?