firewall-overview.md

Firewall overview

• Monitors network traffic and allows or blocks traffic based on a defined set of rules
• Predefined rules ensure only allowed incoming and outgoing traffic can pass through.
• Gateway/filter between two networks usually between private and public (internet)

Firewall architecture

Multi-homed firewalls

• Also known as multi-homed hosts, multihomed hosts, multi homed hosts, multi homed firewalls or multihomed firewalls.
• 📝 A host / firewall that has more than single network interface (NIC)
• Each interface are connected to separate network segments

Dual-homed firewalls

• Dual-home can be a proxy, gateway, firewall etc.
• A special case of bastion hosts.
• Allows them to transfer data between the two networks
• Has two interfaces
  • External or public, usually to untrusted network such as Internet
  • Internal or private, usually to trusted network such as Intranet
• Screened Host
  • Firewall architecture where two filters are used
  • 

Bastion hosts

• Mediates traffic between inside and outside networks
• Designed and configured (hardened) to withstand attacks
• Usually hosts a single service e.g. a proxy server

Screened subnet firewalls

• Screen subnet is also known as DMZ or perimeter network.
• Used to secure servers that are accessible from the internet.
• Consists of three zones:
  1. External (e.g. to internet)
  2. 📝 Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)
     • Placed in-between internal (trusted) and external (untrusted) network
     • Usually where bastions are placed
  3. Private (to internal network e.g. intranet)
• 
• Two routers
  1. External router separating traffic from a perimeter network (DMZ)
  2. Internal router separating perimeter from internal network
• Can be achieved through either
  • Single firewall with three interfaces
    • See also zone-based firewall
  • Three different firewalls
    • 💡 Better as compromising one won't compromise all

Firewall categories

• Hardware Firewall
  • Device placed on the network's perimeter
  • Uses packet filtering technique to filter the traffic
  • Can be a standalone device or part of a router
• Software Firewall
  • Filters traffic on the installed machine
  • Protects its host from unauthorized access, trojans, viruses, and worms.

Software vs Hardware firewalls

Attribute	Hardware firewall	Software firewall
Price	More expensive	Cheaper
Maintainability	Hard	Easy
Speed	Faster response time	Slower response times
Interference	Minimal, can easily remove/replace etc.	Difficult to uninstall

Firewall types per OSI Layer

• 📝 Technologies used per OSI layer

  OSI Layer	Firewall technologies
  7. Application	• Virtual Private Network (VPN) • Application Proxies • Web Application Firewall (WAF) • Request filtering based on headers and payload
  6. Presentation	• Virtual Private Network (VPN)
  5. Session	• Virtual Private Network (VPN) • Circuit-level gateway
  4. Transport	• Virtual Private Network (VPN) • Packet filtering based on port numbers
  3. Network	• Virtual Private Network (VPN) • Network Address Translation (NAT) • Packet filtering, Stateful multilayer inspection
  2. Data Link	• Virtual Private Network (VPN) • Packet filtering

• 📝 All vulnerabilities in one layer is independent of the other layer.

  • E.g. cross-site scripting (application layer) vulnerable application would be vulnerable to it regardless of any protection on other layers.
  • Also vulnerabilities exist at network layers would not be visible to a stateful

• 💡 In most cases, you'd use both a L3 and an L7 firewall and the two complement each other.

• See also OSI model

Packet filtering firewalls

• Implemented on the Network Layer, usually part of routers
• Designed to analyze each packet individually to apply a set of filters
• 📝 Examines the packets headers for source, destination, protocol, destination port, flags..
• Packet is dropped (not forwarded to its destination) if it does not comply with the predefined rules
• 📝 Can be stateful (mostly, newer) or stateless (older).
• Ineffective in preventing Web Application attacks as port 80 and 443 would not be blocked.

Access Control Lists (ACLs)

• Usually packet filtering rules are defined using ACLs (access control lists)
• Known also Wireless Access Control List (WACL) as in wireless routers.
• 📝 Type of rule-based access control
• 📝 E.g.
  • In Linux using iptables, disable all incoming SSH using iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -j DROP
  • In Windows it's controlled with netsh advfirewall (older: netsh firewall)
  • E.g. on Cisco routers using access-list 101 deny tcp any host 100.100.100.1 eq 22
    • where 101 is sequence number that helps with ordering of the rules
      • the lower the number is the higher priority it gets in the ordering
    • ACL are processed in top down meaning if a condition is met all processing is stopped.

Packet inspection

Port-based classification

• E.g. TCP 80 = HTTP
• Old way, today it's useless as assumptions can be wrong

QoS markers (DSCP)

• Similar to port-based but based on QoS tags for prioritization
• Ignored as it's easy to cheat and forge

Statistical traffic classification

• Based on manual rules or ML (machine learning) dataset
• Hard to create a good dataset and poor accuracy for cases outside of the set

Deep Packet Inspection (DPI)

• Inspecting packet payload
• Encrypted payload (e.g. HTTPS) ensures privacy and confidentiality
• Can see DNS query name, HTTP Host/Server fields and SSL/QUIC SNI (Server Name Indication)
• Important for cloud applications sharing same IPs
• Used in e.g. state censorship, and cloud-generation firewalls
• Tools: ntop that's based on nDPI

Stateful firewalls

• Also known as stateful inspection firewalls
  • Stateful inspection is also known as dynamic packet filtering
• Keeps state of open connections.
• When a packet arrives, its header is examined to determine if it belongs to an already established connection.
• If it belongs to a connection, then it's allowed to go through
• Analyzed against defined set of rules to determine if connection is allowed to flow through
• E.g. will filter ACK without TCP connection establishment (with SYN)

Zone-based firewall

• 
• Type of stateful network and multi-homed firewalls.
• Allows setting up rules such to filter / inspect traffic between zones.

Firewall zone

• Logical area in which the devices having same trust levels resides.
• An interface is assigned to a zone.
• By default, traffic is not allowed from one zone to another.
• Common zones
  • Private: inside | Most trusted network
  • Public: outside | Untrusted network
  • DMZ (demilitarized): neutral | Sits in-between private and outside

firewalld

• Zone-based network level firewall on Linux
• Rules can be
  • Runtime: For duration of the session
  • Permanent: Persists through reboot or reload of a firewall
    • ❗ Requires firewall-cmd --reload to apply the rules.
• Commands:
  • Install: yum install firewalld
  • Start: systemctl start firewalld
  • Add rule (allow access): firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-port=80/tcp
  • Remove rule (deny access): firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --remove-port=80/tcp
  • Reload to apply changed rules: firewall-cmd --reload
  • Block access from different countries through geo IP block
    1. Download ip blocks at e.g. ipdeny.com
       1. Download: wget https://www.ipdeny.com/ipblocks/data/countries/all-zones.tar.gz
       2. Extract: tar -vxzf all-zones.tar.gz
    2. Create a list called e.g. blacklist: firewall-cmd --permanent --new-ipset=blacklist --type=hash:net --option-family=inet
       • --type: hash is the storage type, :net is to block whole subnet
       • --inet: ipv4
    3. Add entries to list: firewall-cmd --permanent --ipset=blacklist --add-entries-from-file=us.zone
    4. Apply entries in list
       • Deny access: firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=drop --add-source=ipset:blacklist
       • firewall-cmd --reload
• In /etc/firewall/firewall.d file you can e.g. enable logging for denied traffic.
  • 💡 Careful for what you log as they can grow rapidly as servers, web applications etc. are also logging.

Circuit level gateway firewalls

• Also known as circuit-level gateway
• 📝 Monitors TCP handshakes to determine if the requested connection is legitimate.
• 📝 Implemented on
  • OSI model: Session Layer (5)
  • TCP/IP stack: Between application (4) and transport layer (3)
• It acts as a proxy server using address translation
  • Maps all of internal IP addresses to one "safe" IP address for incoming packet
  • Address is associated with the firewall from which all outgoing packets originate
  • Provides security as untrusted network is only aware of single IP address

Application level firewalls

• Also known as proxy firewall, application firewall or gateway firewall.
• Installed on a proxy server to act as a barrier between internal and external networks.
• Implemented on the application layer.
• 📝 Designed to filter traffic only for the protocols for which they are configured.
• Exposes single address instead of exposing internal network.
  • Clients first establish a connection with a proxy firewall, and then a new network connection is initiated on the client's behalf.
  • Utilizes NAT (Network address translation) to make the translations
• Can function in two modes:
  • Active application-level firewalls: Actively reject or deny requests
  • Passive application-level firewalls: More like IDS, does not filter

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

• Type of an application firewall that filters, monitors, and blocks HTTP traffic to and from a web service.
• 📝 It can prevent attacks exploiting a web application's known vulnerabilities
  • E.g. injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), file inclusion, and improper system configuration.

Application level vs Network level Firewalls

Capability	Application level	Network level
Configuration	Advanced	Narrow (IPS and ports)
Coverage	Small (protocol-specific)	Wider (any IP-based)
Speed	Slower	Faster
Application threats	Greater security	Blind

• 💡 Use multiple layers of defense in depth
  • Level 3 firewall at the edge that only allows inbound traffic on the specific ports used by apps
  • Route those ports to an L7 firewall for deeper inspection.

Stateful multilayer inspection firewall

• Combination of different firewalls:
  • packet filtering (network layer): to filter packets
  • circuit level (session layer): to verify legitimate sessions
  • application level (application layer): to evaluate packets
• A type of hybrid firewall as it's a mix of some of the firewalls already

Network Address Translation (NAT)

• Implemented by many firewalls just like routers
• Enables LAN to use different sets of IP addresses for external and internal traffic.
• NAT modifies the packet's IP header and translates one address space into another
• NAT allows to hide the layout of the internal network.
• Basic NAT
  • One-to-one mapping where each internal IP is mapped to a unique public IP.
  • Too expensive to implement
• Port address translation (PAT)
  • Also known as network address and port translation (NAPT), IP masquerading, NAT overload and many-to-one NAT.
  • Allows multiple internal IP addresses to be mapped to single public IP
  • Uses different port (and other items) for each web conversation.
  • Typically used as is the cheaper option.
• Dynamic vs Static NAT
  • Static NAT: one-to-one internal to public static IP address mapping
  • Dynamic NAT: uses a group of available public IP addresses.

Virtual Private Network (VPN)

• A network which enables a secure connection to a private network through the Internet.
• Information is protected by encryption and integrity checks.
• Can use e.g. IPSec or OpenVPN tunnelling protocol.