Follow Techotopia on Twitter

On-line Guides
All Guides
eBook Store
iOS / Android
Linux for Beginners
Office Productivity
Linux Installation
Linux Security
Linux Utilities
Linux Virtualization
Linux Kernel
System/Network Admin
Programming
Scripting Languages
Development Tools
Web Development
GUI Toolkits/Desktop
Databases
Mail Systems
openSolaris
Eclipse Documentation
Techotopia.com
Virtuatopia.com
Answertopia.com

How To Guides
Virtualization
General System Admin
Linux Security
Linux Filesystems
Web Servers
Graphics & Desktop
PC Hardware
Windows
Problem Solutions
Privacy Policy

  




 

 

Linux Administrator's Security Guide
Prev Home Next

Linux Firewalling Overview

By Kurt Seifried [email protected]

Contents

Introduction

Firewalling is the practice of filtering network traffic, typically at the point where your network connects to another (e.g. the Internet, a customers LAN, etc.) network, that may be untrusted (in the case of the Internet) or perhaps even trusted (another floor of your building). Like firewalls in a large building, a network firewall can prevent and even block the spread of an attack if one segment is compromised successfully, like their namesake firewalls can stop your network from being further compromised.There is a good FAQ on Internet firewalls at: https://www.interhack.net/pubs/fwfaq/. A list of port numbers and what they are is available https://seifried.org/security/ports/

Firewall software for Linux

Linux has gone through a series of firewalls. The most recent is IPTables (sometimes referred to as NETFILTER), preceding that was ipchains, and preceding this was ipfwadm, as well there are a number of other firewalls such as IPF and SINUS firewall (some of which only work on 2.0 and 2.2 series kernels so are largely obsolete). I would recommend using a 2.4 kernel with IPTables if possible since it offers stateful packet inspection, which makes firewalling protocols such as DNS and FTP properly a lot easier. Linux also supports IPMASQ (IP Masquerading) as part of it's firewall capabilities, an advanced form of NAT (Network Address Translation). IPMASQ allows you to hook up a network of computers to the Internet but proxy their connections at the IP level. Thus all traffic appears to be coming and going to one machine (the Linux IPMASQ box) which affords a high degree of protection to the internal network. As an added bonus the clients on the internal network require NO proxy configuration; as long as the Linux IPMASQ server is configured correctly, and the clients use it as their default gateway, things will work quite well.

Both ipchains and ipfwadm provide the following basic capabilities:

  • blocking/passing of data based on source/destination IP address and port
  • masquerading of connections based on source/destination IP address and port

In addition to which ipchains supports:

  • port forwarding
  • creation of chains, for more intricate rules and conditions, speedier rule parsing and easier management
  • quality of service (QOS) routing, useful on low speed connections or otherwise saturated connections
  • specification of IP/port/interface as well as inverse specification (using the !, i.e. "everything but")

The Firewall-HOWTO and "man <command>" (ipchains, ipfwadm or IPTables) page both cover in great detail the mechanics for setting up rules, but don't really cover the strategy for firewalling safely. Your first basic choice (well actually it's not so basic) to make is whether to go with default deny or default allow policies, followed by which services and hosts you wish to allow and block.

When deciding policy you should ideally choose a policy that will default to denying everything unless specifically allowed through (that is if there is a failure it will hopefully be minimized via default policies) or a policy that allows everything and blocks certain services/hosts. I typically use a policy of default denial as it can accommodate mistakes and changes more safely then a policy that defaults to allowing data through.

Case in point, you have a server secured via firewalling, currently running Apache, you install WU-FTPD on it for internal use (so people can upload files) at 3 am, you forget to change the firewall rules. If you have chosen a policy of default allowal, anyone on the Internet can access the ftp server, and silly you, you installed an old version which allowed someone to compromise the machine. If on the other hand you go with a policy of default denial, they would not have access to the ftp server, and neither would your users, but you would find out quite quickly. Annoyed users are much easier to appease then fixing a network that has been compromised.

Firewall concepts

Some of the problems with firewalling and what you can do ensure they don't affect you to much.

Firewalling is typically seen as simple and effective security measure, but nothing could be farther from the truth.

IPTables

Firewalling for Linux 2.4 and 2.5. Provides stateful filtering unlike IPChains and IPFWADM. Combined with Linux advanced routing you can do many interesting and several downright bizarre things.

IPTables (sometimes referred to as NETFILTER) is the current generation of packet firewalling for Linux. It is stateful, and easily extended, providing very powerful firewall capabilities to Linux. IPTables includes numerous new features, from advanced logging to the ability to do string matching. Backwards compatibility for ipfwadm and ipchains rules is provided with modules, allowing you to easily upgrade to IPTables with minimal effort. Unfortunately the majority of IPTables documents are not incredibly great, and the more advanced features can be difficult to use correctly.

Although the HOWTO's are far from perfect I can't really do justice to recreating the IPTables HOWTO's so instead I will just point you to them:

https://netfilter.samba.org/unreliable-guides/packet-filtering-HOWTO/packet-filtering-HOWTO.linuxdoc.html.

This is the most basic document, and will get you up and running.

https://netfilter.samba.org/documentation/HOWTO//NAT-HOWTO.html

This document cover NAT (Network Address Translation, sometimes referred to as IPMASQ in Linux).

https://netfilter.samba.org/documentation/HOWTO//netfilter-extensions-HOWTO.html

This document covers extensions available in IPTables.

https://netfilter.samba.org/documentation/index.html

This lists all the documents available in various languages.

A very basic example

For those of you that just want to get on with it here is a simple iptables firewall script I use that is suitable for machines with one interface:

#
# First set some default policies
#

iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT
iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
iptables -P FORWARD DROP

#
# Then block the reserved network 10.* on the external interface eth0
#

-A INPUT -s 10.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 -d 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 -i eth0 -j DROP

#
# Then we allow SSH, SMTP and DNS
#
-A INPUT -s 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 -d 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 -i eth0 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22:22 -j ACCEPT 
-A INPUT -s 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 -d 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 -i eth0 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 25:25 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -s 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 -d 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 -i eth0 -p udp -m udp --dport 53:53 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -s 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 -d 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 -i eth0 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 53:53 -j ACCEPT
#
# Now we block all incoming traffic to ports between 1 and 1024. For your system
#
-A INPUT -s 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 -d 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 -i eth0 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 1:1024 -j REJECT
-A INPUT -s 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 -d 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 -i eth0 -p udp -m udp --dport 1:1024 -j REJECT

Some more tricks with IPTables

Invalid packets

One of the nicest things about IPTables is that it is stateful, and there are several options for state: NEW, ESTABLISHED, RELATED and INVALID. INVALID is especially interesting as it will:

"A packet which could not be identified for some reason: this includes running out of memory and ICMP errors which don't correspond to any known connection. Generally these packets should be dropped."

Putting this rule first in your list may be a wise decision since it will prevent mangled packets from traversing your chains and additionally it may help with survivability of your server if someone attacks it.

-A INPUT -s 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 -d 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 -m state --state INVALID -j DROP

Listing Tables

Typically most of us will use:

iptables -L -v -n

However this will not show all the tables (most importantly it misses the pretrouting and postrouting tables, used for NAT among other things).

To list current NAT tables:

iptables -t nat -L -v -n

Dropping every second or third packet

This is guarenteed to drive network administrators a bit nutty, and amuse attackers to ne end. Using the "nth" rule (not supported by default in most kernels) you can drop every "nth" packet:

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -m nth --every 2 -j DROP 

This rule would drop every second packet coming in to port 80 (the webserver usually).

IPChains

Firewalling for Linux 2.2 and present in 2.4 for backwards compatibility as well. Does not provide stateful filtering, but provides chains, making it easier to manage then ipfwadm.


IPChains contains several new features as compared to ipfwadm; you can create chains of rules (hence the name) and link them together, making administration of firewalls far easier. IPChains supports more targets then ipfwadm; you can point a rule at: ACCEPT, DENY, REJECT, MASQ, REDIRECT, or RETURN or a user defined chain. As such it is very powerful, for example I could redirect all packets bound for port 80 (www traffic) going through my gateway machine to be redirected to local port 3128, the Squid proxy server. You can also use this in conjunction with quality of service routing, the example given in ipfwadm's documentation is that of prioritizing traffic going over a PPP link, you can give telnet traffic a much higher priority then say ftp, reducing latency problems caused by a saturated link. Typically I create an /etc/rc.d/init.d/ipchains-sh (or wherever appropriate) and call it immediately before the networking is brought up, this leaves a NO time in which the server is vulnerable. 

The following script is appropriate for a gateway with 2 interfaces running, the reason I have used the DENY instead of REJECT target is so that the packet is dropped and not responded to in any way, this slows down network scans (as they wait for the packet to timeout instead of receiving a response) and gives away less information. I would also advise against logging data unless you have a significant amount of drive space available, for each packet I send (several bytes) many bytes of drive space is used up to create a log entry, making it easy to overwhelm syslog and/or your drive space on a fast connection.

#!/bin/bash
#
# This script sets up firewall rules appropriate for a server with 2 interfaces 
# running as a gateway
# This script needs to be edited if you plan to use it.
# We assume the internal machines call all talk to the gateway, so no rules block
# internal traffic
#
# A couple of variables
#
# ETH0 is the IP address on ETH0 (the external interface)
# ETH0NET is the network 
# ETH0NETMASK is the network mask
# TRUSTEDHOST1 is a trusted host (for webmin/ssh)
# TRUSTEDHOST2 is a trusted host (for webmin/ssh)
# ETH1IP is the IP address on ETH1 (internal interface)
# ETH1NET is the network
# ETH1NETMASK is the network mask
#
ETH0IP=1.1.1.1
ETH0NET=1.1.1.0
ETH0NETMASK=24
TRUSTEDHOST1=1.5.1.1
TRUSTEDHOST2=1.5.1.2
ETH1IP=10.0.0.1
ETH1NET=10.0.0.0
ETH1NETMASK=24
#
PATH=/sbin
# FLUSH ALL RULES
ipchains -F input
ipchains -F output
ipchains -F forward
# ANTI-SPOOFING 
ipchains -A input -p all -j DENY -s 10.0.0.0/8 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0
ipchains -A input -p all -j DENY -s 127.0.0.0/8 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0
ipchains -A input -p all -j DENY -s 192.168.0.0/16 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0
ipchains -A input -p all -j DENY -s 172.16.0.0/16 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0
ipchains -A input -p all -j DENY -s $ETH0IP -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0
# ICMP FIRST
ipchains -A input -p icmp -j ACCEPT -s $ETH0NET/$ETH0NETMASK -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0
ipchains -A input -p icmp -j DENY -s 0.0.0.0/0 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0
# SSH
ipchains -A input -p tcp -j ACCEPT -s $TRUSTEDHOST1 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 22
ipchains -A input -p tcp -j ACCEPT -s $TRUSTEDHOST2 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 22
# BLOCKING 1:1023
ipchains -A input -p tcp -j DENY -s 0.0.0.0/0 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 1:1023
ipchains -A input -p udp -j DENY -s 0.0.0.0/0 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 1:1023
# BLOCKING OTHER THINGS
ipchains -A input -p tcp -j DENY -s 0.0.0.0/0 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 1109
ipchains -A input -p tcp -j DENY -s 0.0.0.0/0 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 1524
ipchains -A input -p tcp -j DENY -s 0.0.0.0/0 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 1600
ipchains -A input -p tcp -j DENY -s 0.0.0.0/0 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 2003
ipchains -A input -p udp -j DENY -s 0.0.0.0/0 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 2049
ipchains -A input -p tcp -j DENY -s 0.0.0.0/0 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 2105
ipchains -A input -p udp -j DENY -s 0.0.0.0/0 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 3001
ipchains -A input -p tcp -j DENY -s 0.0.0.0/0 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 3001
ipchains -A input -p udp -j DENY -s 0.0.0.0/0 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 3128:3130
ipchains -A input -p tcp -j DENY -s 0.0.0.0/0 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 3128:3130
ipchains -A input -p tcp -j DENY -s 0.0.0.0/0 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 3306
ipchains -A input -p udp -j DENY -s 0.0.0.0/0 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 3306
ipchains -A input -p tcp -j DENY -s 0.0.0.0/0 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 4444
ipchains -A input -p tcp -j DENY -s 0.0.0.0/0 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 6000:6100
ipchains -A input -p udp -j DENY -s 0.0.0.0/0 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 6000:6100
ipchains -A input -p tcp -j DENY -s 0.0.0.0/0 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 6667
ipchains -A input -p tcp -j DENY -s 0.0.0.0/0 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 7000
# WEBMIN
ipchains -A input -p tcp -j ACCEPT -s $TRUSTEDHOST1 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 10000
ipchains -A input -p tcp -j ACCEPT -s $TRUSTEDHOST2 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 10000
ipchains -A input -p tcp -j DENY -s 0.0.0.0/0 -i eth0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 10000
# FORWARD RULES
ipchains -P forward DENY
ipchains -A forward -p all -j MASQ -s $ETH1NET/$ETH1NETMASK -d 0.0.0.0/0

Firewall scripts

Some scripts for Red Hat Linux in rpm format: https://www.webideal.de/rh-isdn/downloads/.

ipfwadm2ipchains

A simple script that converts ipfwadm rules to ipchains rules, making migration a snap. The script is available at: https://users.dhp.com/~whisper/ipfwadm2ipchains/

IPFWADM

Firewalling for Linux 2.0, no longer present. Not recommended.

If you are still using ipfwadm it is time to upgrade from 2.0 to a 2.2 kernel. Seriously, stop reading and upgrade to at least a 2.2 kernel or preferably a 2.4 kernel.

Ipfwadm is a solid packet filter for Linux, although it lacks a lot of features available in IPChains. Ipfwadm only supports 3 targets for a packet: accept, deny or reject, whereas ipchains rules can be targeted at 6 built-in targets, or a user defined target. Ipfwadm is really only appropriate for a simple IP-level firewall, IP masquerading and if you plan to use FreeS/WAN (which currently does not support kernel 2.2.x). The basic options are: specify a direction (in, out, or both, useful with the interface flag), input rules, output rules, forwarding rules (say you have multiple interfaces, also covers the masquerading rules) and masquerade rules which control the behavior of masquerading (timeouts, etc). You can insert, append and delete rules, set default policies, and list all the rules. Other then that it is very similar to ipchains, with some minor variations. The following is a script appropriate for a server bridging 2 networks (10.0.0.x on eth0, 10.0.0.1 and 192.168.0.x on eth1, 192.168.0.1) with a mail server running.

#!/bin/bash
#
# Flush all the rule sets first
#
ipfwadm -f -I
ipfwadm -f -O
ipfwadm -f -F
#
# Allow forwarding between the two networks and otherwise deny it for security
#
ipfwadm -F -a accept -P all -S 10.0.0.0/24 -i eth0 -D 192.168.0.0/24
ipfwadm -F -a accept -P all -S 192.168.0.0/24 -i eth1 -D 10.0.0.0/24
ipfwadm -F -p deny
#
# And of course we have to allow those packets in
#
ipfwadm -I -a accept -P tcp -S 10.0.0.0/24 -i eth0 -D 192.168.0.0/24
ipfwadm -I -a accept -P tcp -S 192.168.0.0/24 -i eth1 -D 10.0.0.0/24
#
# Let them access the mail server port on the server but nothing else
#
ipfwadm -I -a accept -P tcp -S 10.0.0.0/24 -i eth0 -D 10.0.0.1 25
ipfwadm -I -a accept -P tcp -S 192.168.0.0/24 -i eth0 -D 192.168.0.1 25
ipfwadm -I -p deny

Rule creation / scripts

Kfirewall

From the site:

Kfirewall is an GUI application for X, using the KDE/QT widgets. You need to have KDE installed on your system, and qt-devel-1.44 installed. You can find the KDE packages at ftp://ftp.kde.org/

Firewall piercing

Sometimes you will be stuck behind a firewall that is not properly set up, or otherwise stopping you from accessing data you need to. Other times users will simply want to climb over any walls you put on the network, and the best way to defend is to understand the attack. There is actually a mini-HOWTO on this; https://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Firewall-Piercing.html. In addition to this is an add-on for the IP Masquerading code that allows certain types of VPN's through, you can get it at: ftp://ftp.rubyriver.com/pub/jhardin/masquerade/ip_masq_vpn.html.

Linux Administrator's Security Guide
Prev Home Next

 
 
  Copyright Kurt Seifried 2001 [email protected]. Published under the terms of the Open Content License Design by Interspire