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2018 Internation Conference on Advances in Science, Technology and Engineering(ICaste-2018), April 20-21, 2018,

Thane, Mumbai

Implementing Linux Based Firewall Using Netfilter/IPtables

Prof .Vaibhav Narawade


A.P. Shah Institute of Technology
Thane-400615, India
venarawade@apsit.edu.in

Kartik Shetty Devesh Singh Sujoy Das


Dept. Of Computer Engineering Dept. Of Computer Engineering Dept. Of Computer Engineering
A.P. Shah Institute of Technology A.P. Shah Institute of Technology A.P. Shah Institute of Technology
Thane-400615, India Thane-400615, India Thane-400615, India
kartikshetty49@gmail.com singhdevesh821@gmail.com sujoy5819@gmail.com

Abstract : The day to day developments in the field of This paper first discuss about the architecture of
computer network has improved our modes of Netfilter/IPtable and then discuss about the design and
communication, It has not only made our life more, configuration of the firewall.
effective and convenient, but has also introduced a
variety of network threats. Firewall, as a main way to II. Literature Review
prevent network attacks, often used to prevent illegal Baoliang Wang; Kaining Lu; Peng Chang.“Design and
connections and seperate our internal network from Implementation Linux firewall based on the frame of
illegal or insecure connections. In this project, the main Netfilter/IPtable “[1]
content is to build a functioning firewall which is based This paper briefly analyzes the Netfilter/IPtable
on the Linux based operating system, using Netfilter as architecture and principle and working process of state
firewall architecture, and the IPtables as a user space detection technology, then, configure the firewall. At the
module tool last, the firewall experiment verified the effectiveness of
the firewall.
Index Terms : Linux; firewall; state detection;
Netfilter/IPtable Myon That; Kyaw Zaw Ye; Kyaw Myat Thu and Si Thu
Thant Sin.”Development of Firewall Optimization Model
I. Introduction using by Packet filter”[2]
This paper introduces the basic rules for packet filtering
The rapid development of information process with a certain set of rules for better identification
technology has increased our day to day encounter with and what security rules should be implied for each set of
various network security threats. All kinds of network packets.
breakdown issues has been reported in the past few years
which has made us to take network security a serious Bao Zhong; Liang Huanqing.“Design a New Firewall
issue into consideration. Every year, thousands and Based on Netfilter”[3]
millions of computers are used by hackers to launch Based on the firewall of next generation, this paper takes
DDoS attacks which affects thousands of hosts around the the instant messaging software QQ as an analysis object
world. The major number of targets for these types of to propose an improved content filter firewall which could
attacks are small and medium-sized enterprises who lack block QQ login through extracting, analyzing and judging
sufficient security measures installed on their system. The the content of data packet in the network. The technology
main purpose of these paper is to build a full-functioning proposed by this paper can accurately identify the users,
Linux based firewall for small and medium-sized applications and contents according to their behaviors and
enterprises to make their network as safe as possible. characteristics, with the ability of complete safety
Linux, being an open source operating system, protection.
with open source code, high efficiency, speed and having
no copyright related issues provides a suitable Chen Ming, Zhang Xiaoyong. “Analysis DDoS attack and
environment for development of various independent Its Protective Measures.”[4]
security tools. The firewall is designed to run on Linux The paper prosposed the methods of detection of common
based operating system DDoS attacks and provides a detailed analysis on how the
while using Netfilter as the firewall architecture and attacks are carried on by the hackers and the number of
IPtable protective measures which can be implemented to avoid
as the user state module to achieve the function of state the DDoS attacks as much as possible.
detection resisting common DDoS based attacks and log
records of the Linux firewall.
2018 Internation Conference on Advances in Science, Technology and Engineering(ICaste-2018), April 20-21, 2018,
Thane, Mumbai

Zhoa Yanan, Ma Zhaofeng. “Research and Application of B. State Detection Principle


Netfilter/IPtable in Linux”[5] Checkpoint company was the first to put forward
Gives a detailed information about the Netfilter the state detection technology as it combine the effeciency
Framework and the built in user module IPtable. How and security of packet filter. A state detection firewall
Netfilter plays an important role in creating connection treats all packets belonging to a same connection as a
and IPtables can be configured using various simple whole packet and constitutes them to connection status
instruction to block unwanted packets from insecure table and monitors the entire connection until terminated.
connections . The state detection determines whether the port needs to
be opened and closes the port onces the transmission is
R. C. Diovu; J. T. Agee.”Quantitative analysis of firewall over to maintain the security of the system. State
security under DDoS attack in smart grid AMI networks” detection also increases the data flow of the packets. It
[6] checkes whether the incoming packet has been already
In this paper, PRISM model checker is used to perform a been added to the connection status table, before which
probablistic best and worst case analysis of the firewall the packets has to clear certain set of rules defined by the
with regards of the attack success under different firewall administrator. If the packet satisfies the condition which
detection probablities ranging from 0 to 1. prove whether the packet is safe to allow then the packet
is allowed to enter the network or the system. So the
Cai Misoqi. “Based on the Research of Linux Firewall following packets in the data stream, which belong to the
and Log Analysis”[7] verified connection are directly let into the system. This
Show the Log Analysis done for inspecting the activitiess avoid comples security rules and greatly improve the
that are performed by firewall and monitoring of the overall efficiency of the firewall
incoming and outgoing packets. As Linux being a highly The Activity diagram of the state detection
effecient operating system, it provides a very suitable firewall is shown below.
environment for development of security related tools

Alex X. Liu; Amir R. Khakpour; Joshua W. Hulst; Zihui


Ge; Dan Pei; Jia Wang. “Firewall Fingerprinting and
Denial of Firewalling Attacks”[8]
In this paper, first, we investigate some possible firewall
fingerprinting methods and surprisingly found that these
methods can achieve quite high accuracy. Second, we
study what we call denial of firewalling (DoF) attacks,
where attackers use carefully crafted traffic to effectively
overload a firewall. To the best of our knowledge, this
paper represents the first study of firewall fingerprinting
and DoF attacks.

II. Technology Used

A. Framework of Netfilter/IPtable
Netfilter is seamless conjuction with TCP/IP protocol
stack and offers various function and operations for
packet filtering, network address translation and port
translation, which provie the functionality required for
directing packets through a network, as well as providing
ability to prohibit packets from reaching sensetive
locations within the computer network. The important
tool module like IPtable is connected to Netfilter
architecture
Netfilter exists in two ways in Linux systems
which are related and unrelated with IPv6 and IPv4.
IPv4 related files are stored in lib/modules/2.6.32-
431.e16.x86_64/kernel/net/IPv4/netfilter, and IPv6 files Figure 1
are stored in lib/modules/2.6.32-
431.e16.x86_64/kernel/IPv6/netfiler. C. Logs of Firewall
They all have no relation with the agreement, so the A log in a system has a collection of operation
Netfilter can work in both IPv4 and IPv6 environment results which are arranged in a chronological order. Each
log file contains details of different system event. It is a
text file which a user can easily read and understand. Log
2018 Internation Conference on Advances in Science, Technology and Engineering(ICaste-2018), April 20-21, 2018,
Thane, Mumbai

plays a vital role in system security as it can help Sometimes you need to temporarily stop using
understand the user where the system has gone wrong and firewall, because the firewall will stop completely when
helps to identify errors using firewall scripts and add ‘stop’ parameter in it.
Netfilter provides the funciton of logging, which The indepth analysis of packets in as shown
used to record network flows . The logging function can below.
be activated by entering -j LOG command in IPtables.

III. Design and Implementation


A. Setting up the environment
This experiment required the computers to be
connected on a single network through a switch while the
main computer connected to the computer acts as a server

B. Configuring firewall
1. Configuring kernel
As IPtable is divided into user layer management
and kernel module , the initialization involves the
compilation and installation of Linux kernel and user
programs. We are about to use the current latest kernel
version, 4.15.2 to compile the Netfilter.

2. Create shell script


Linux firewall usually consists of lot of IPtables
command lines and each are executed only once. In order
to use more convenient method, we write down firewall
filtering rules into the shell script and save in the path for
the etc/rc.d/rc.fw, and set permissions for the script.
[root@localhost linux-3.6]# touch /etc/rc.d/rc.fw
[root@localhost linux-3.6]# chown root:root/etc/rc.d/rc.
fw
[root@localhost linux-3.6]# chmod u=rwx/etc/rc.d/rc.
fw
By editing the shell script in etc/rc.d/rc.local we
can automatically set the firewall script to start as the
system startup.

3. Deleting existing filtering rules


When defining a new set of filtering rules, we
need to first flush out the already existing rules.. If the Figure 2
existing rules are not deleted then the already exisiting
rules are took into consideration first, then the new set of IV. Demerits of the design
rules defined in the shell script. If this happens then the
packets will be first matched to first set of rules and then 1. Only for small and medium-sized enterprises.
followed by the next set. If this happens then the results
will be wrong and we might put our system in danger. We 2. Realize state detection and simple anti DDoS attack.
also need to remove chain bags, custom rules and timers.
3. Inspect only packet header information while no
4. Change default policy analysis of the data is being perfoemed.
The default strategy is to throw away a message.
After using the strategy, the packets allowed explicitly by 4. Results may vary as per the structure of the network.
the rules will be allowed while others will be discardes.
Compared to the default policy that sends all data packets
across, the strategy to configure data to be rejected is
much more safer.

5. Reset and Stop the working of firewall.


2018 Internation Conference on Advances in Science, Technology and Engineering(ICaste-2018), April 20-21, 2018,
Thane, Mumbai

V. References
[1]Baoliang Wang; Kaining Lu; Peng Chang.“Design and
Implementation Linux firewall based on the frame of
Netfilter/IPtable “

[2]Myon That; Kyaw Zaw Ye; Kyaw Myat Thu and Si


Thu Thant Sin.”Development of Firewall Optimization
Model using by Packet filter”

[3]Bao Zhong; Liang Huanqing.“Design a New Firewall


Based on Netfilter”

[4]Chen Ming, Zhang Xiaoyong. “Analysis DDoS attack


and Its Protective Measures.”

[5]Zhoa Yanan, Ma Zhaofeng. “Research and Application


of Netfilter/IPtable in Linux”

[6]R. C. Diovu; J. T. Agee.”Quantitative analysis of


firewall security under DDoS attack in smart grid AMI
networks”

[7]Cai Misoqi. “Based on the Research of Linux Firewall


and Log Analysis”

[8]Alex X. Liu; Amir R. Khakpour; Joshua W. Hulst;


Zihui Ge; Dan Pei; Jia Wang. “Firewall Fingerprinting
and Denial of Firewalling Attacks”

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