Security question for multi port devices

Product support
1

Hi all, I’m trying to write up a little whitepaper for our BalenaOS based devices. All of our devices have multiple ethernet ports. Basic question, does BalenaOS, out of the box, forward or bridge interfaces in any way? This is just a question around if the device sits on two separate segments, what kind of risk does it represent? Is IP forwarding off by default?

Thank you.

2

Balena by default treats each network interface independently, with a configuration to acquire an IP via DHCP if plugged in. For our devices we bake some default configuration for each interface into the balenaOS image but you can do anything with them that Network Manager can normally do.