Table of Contents
Change directory into /etc/nftfw/incoming.d (maybe /usr/local/etc/nftfw/incoming.d).
You'll see something like
$ ls
05-ping 10-https 30-imaps 50-smtps
06-ftp-helper 20-ftp 40-pop3 50-submission
07-ssh 21-ftp-passive 40-pop3s 60-sieve
10-http 30-imap 50-smtp 99-dropSome of the filenames in the directory access 'rules' in the rule.d directory. There's more information on the manual page in nftfw_files in man section 5.
Each file makes a rule for the firewall, and starts with a two digit number that supplies the ordering of the rules. A new entry needs to be adding before the 99-reject rule. So let's pick '70' for that.
The rest of the filename can be a port number or the service name, but that must be in /etc/services. Let's say we want to add access to our name server, and that's on port 53, called domain in /etc/services. We can either add 70-domain or 70-53. The easiest way to do this is to use the touch command (you may have to use sudo):
because the file is empty, connections from any IP address may access this service.
The command:
lists the services currently being used on your machine, along with the process that is using them. Some of these will be used internally, and you may not wish to make them globally available.
By default, the incoming firewall will reject advances from IP addresses. To permit access, you must create a rule as above. You can remove the files in this directory for services you don't need. For example, If you don't need to use the POP service, you can simply delete 40_pop3 and 40_pop3s in the incoming directory. You should delete any file that names a service you don't want to allow people to have access to.
If you want to only allow access to say ssh to a known set of IP addresses, then you can add those IP addresses into the 07-ssh file, one per line. Only the addresses found in the file can access the_ssh_ service. You can add the domain name of system to the file, and that will include both their IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, if they have both. It's probably a good idea to run a caching domain name server on your machine if you use names in the files.
First you need to find the IP addresses of the machines, the easiest way is to use the host command:
$ host notarealmachine.co.uk
notarealmachine.co.uk has address 203.0.113.134
notarealmachine.co.uk has IPv6 address 2001:db8::a676:7186Armed with the IP addresses, create a file in whitelist.d using the address as the name.
$ touch 203.0.113.134
If you want to allow all the addresses from the network, allowing 1-254 in the last section of the address, you can add a 'CIDR' mask of 24 bits to match the first three sections of the address. CIDR addresses are usually written with '/', in this case 203.0.113.0/24, but we cannot use / in a filename, so replace it by the vertical bar symbol:
If you put the full address from the host command into the directory, nftfw will 'normalise' the address to replace the 134 by zero.
For IPv6 addresses we always match the first 64 bits of the address. IPv6 addresses are abbreviated by writing '::' for any sequences of zeros in the address, so to allow their IPv6 address you can write:
You may find some files ending with .auto in the directory, the whitelist scanner has installed these when it's found that a user has logged in from the address. The scanner will look after these, and will expire them automatically after 90 days.
The files in the whitelist.d directory are empty to allow access to all services, but can contain a list of port numbers, one per line, restricting access from the named address to only those ports. For example, restricting access to ssh is done by:
The blacklist.d directory uses the same convention for files used for the whitelist. Simply create a file named for the IP address in the directory.
The blacklist scanner will automatically create files in the directory ending in .auto when it finds sites that are misbehaving. The scanner uses files in the patterns.d directory to find log files to scan, and how to interpret lines in the log files as bad.
The blacknets.d directory can contain a set of files each with a list of IP addresses, one to a line, expressed in CIDR notation. To block a country, you'll need the list of all the networks that the country uses and these are available from several places on the web, see Getting CIDR Lists for how to install them.
The nft command prints the contents of the firewall with the command:
You can print just the IPv4 and IPv6 sets separately with
This is too much typing, so I alias these commands in my shell startup files:
You'll see that most rules have counters, so you can see what has happened in the past, what's busy and what's in use.
The blacklist scanner uses files in the patterns.d directory. Each file here supplies a file (or files) processed by the scanner, a port number (or a comma-separated list) used for blocking and a set of regular expressions that match the lines in the log files indicating bad behaviour.
You can find out what's blocked on your system by using:
This will print a table of the IP addresses the scanner has found, the number of matches, the number of 'incidents' - each incident is a separate run of the scanner, when it happened first, the last time a match happened, and the name of the pattern that triggered the event.
If the command says nothing, then possibly the scanner hasn't detected enough events for the match count to exceed the threshold where it creates blacklist file. The -a flag to the program prints all the entries in its database.
If you install the geoip2 country database on your system, and its python interface, then nftfwls will show the country of origin when it displays its output. Access to the geoip2 databases is free, but MaxMind who produce it ask you to sign up. See the document Installing Geolocation for installation and signup information.
The nftfwedit command also allows you to ask questions about any IP address, including the country of origin and whether the IP address is in selected DNS blacklist sites.
If an IP address has found its way into the blacklist in error, then you can delete it using
this will remove the address from the blacklist database and also delete the entry in the blacklist.d directory. If you just remove the address from the directory, nftfw will reinstate it because it's in the database.
If you've spotted a line in a logfile that you want to use to blacklist a site, then first see if the logfile is already scanned by the system and just add a new regular expression to the file. You can create a new pattern file if needed, calling it anything, but it must end in .pattern. Do beware that some log entries can appear in several log files.
The regular expression doesn't need to match the whole line, you need to identify where the IP address is in the line and use the string __IP__ (that's two underscores at each end) to pick it out. There should be enough information on the regular expression to make it only select one line. Look in the pattern files for examples. There's also a section in the User's Guide.
You can use the nftfw command to see if your expression works. Create a new pattern file and set
and add your regular expression. Now say:
and this will print a table showing the number of matches that the expression has detected. The PATTERN is the name of your file but without the .pattern appended. The -x option makes the program print a table, and also starts scanning the file from the beginning and doesn't record where it found the end of the file, so using this command will not interfere with normal processing.
The blacklist scanner normally ignores pattern files with ports=test, so it's safe to leave these files in place.
The file /etc/nftfw/config.ini is a readable configuration file that contains all the settings that can be changed. As distributed all the values are commented out, each line starts with a semi-colon. There are many comments in the file explaining what each setting does.
See the manual page nftfw-config for a description.
The file /etc/nftfw/nftfw_init.nft contains the template nftables framework for nftfw. Add new rules by editing the file. You can find an example of a template used for handling a gateway machine with WAN and LAN interfaces in /etc/nftfw/etc_nftfw/nftfw_router_example. Rules for a router adds a nat table and uses the forward table.
nftfw_init.nft uses nft's readable file format. When deciding what to add or change, the best strategy is to add your new rules to the system using the nft command line interface to check that they work and use:
to see how nft 'sees' the rules. Rules expressed on the command line can contain syntax that nft thinks is unnessary, and can also use some assumptions about defaults that nft will add to the compiled rules. Extract any changes from the nft output and edit nftfw_init.nft.
The User's Guide to nftfw documents the system and there are also UNIX manual pages.
All of this is made possible by shamelessly borrowing ideas from Patrick Cherry who created the Symbiosis hosting package for Bytemark of which the firewall system is part.