Hello Michael,
Hi,
On Sun, 2017-11-19 at 15:52 +0100, Peter Müller wrote:
Hello development list,
today, I'd like to discuss whether a new feature in the firewall engine of IPFire makes sense or not.
Since Core Update 90, IPFire supports GeoIP based firewall rules, which goes beyond simple IP addresses or CIDR blocks and makes firewalling easier.
The idea I had in mind is to add ASN (Autonomous System Number) support for firewall rules, too.
An AS (Autonomous System) can be described as an administrative instance on top of IP: For example, several IP blocks belong to an AS, i.e. to the same company, university or whatever. Although these blocks may be used for completely different purposes in completely different countries, they share the same owner.
Every AS has a number (ASN) and a description (sometimes abbreviated to ASDescr), while the number is unique.
I think this makes sense and I would welcome that as a new feature in IPFire. It will in the end have some similar problems like the GeoIP blocker, but that is not too bad.
Just for curiosity: Which ones are they?
I only see the (potential) problem of _another_ incomplete database here (see below). Since all necessary data for this AS stuff are more or less public, inaccurate data and extensive manual research are not necessary.
All we need is to write some scripts that convert the RIPE, ... databases to a suitable format.
Second, in contrast to the GeoIP database, false-positives are extremely rare when dealing with AS information since they have to be technically correct. As always, there are some "good" and "bad" ASNs, and a lot "grey" ones, which stays the same.
There are some scenarios in which AS based firewall rules make sense, since AS information change less seldom than IP ranges:
(a) One wants to block malicious traffic, but blocking entire countries is too much since there are some legitimate partners, customers, ... out there. With AS support, it is possible to grant them access by simply permitting their AS. The rest of the country may now safely be blocked.
True. This might work well in some situations, but is probably quite useless when fighting against a botnet.
I am not sure about this. In some cases, blocking access to some bullet proof/ rogue ISPs where many C&C servers are hosted improves the situation. Of course, if there is a simple DDoS attack from many different IPs, this will not help very much.
What would also be good is to open a port forwarding only from a certain AS. Let's call that whitelisting.
Yes, that is a very good use case. :-)
And the combination of GeoIP and AS filtering (inbound and outbound) opens up fare more possibilities...
(b) In some cases, IP ranges change very often, making firewall rules very complex and hard to maintain, or the exact IP address of a machine cannot be determined (dial-up connections). In both cases, the AS (mostly) stays the same and allows firewall rules without permitting access to a whole country.
That will be the biggest challenge here. The database will need to be complete and needs regular updates. We don't really care if someone is actually announcing their prefix, but if they have one assigned, we should block/permit access.
I agree with you.
We could simply ship an updated version with every Core Update (I had that in mind for the CA list, too, so we don't get too big deltas).
(c) Rogue ISPs (networks which are controlled/operated by professional spammers or worse, such as the "Russian Business Network" (RBN), which died in end-2007) sometimes run networks located in "good" countries such as US or NL. Blocking them by GeoIP is not an option because of many false-positives. AS based rules may help here.
The US is practically unblockable on the GeoIP filter, because too much is hosted in the US (at least according to the database by businesses that have their HQ there).
Indeed, and there are several ASs over there the internet would be a better place without. But I guess that applies to most other countries, too.
So this would be a good extension to blocking more granular.
Since the data behind this can be extracted from BGP feeds, no external databases (such as MaxMind) are required.
If we would use a BGP feed, we will only have the networks in the database that are currently announced. Wouldn't scraping the WHOIS database be better?
Good idea. For example, RIPE has one here: http://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/dbase/split/inet(6)num.gz
Why not MaxMind? Not that I am in favour of that, but I am interested why it is not an option.
Well, technically, it is an option. But since there is some trouble with their GeoIP database, as mentioned somewhere else some time before, I'd like to move away from them.
And since we can build our own database here, I do not see why we should rely on 3rd party data.
Unfortunately, my programming skills are too low for implementing this feature. Thereof, if it is decided to do this, I will need some help here. :-)
*raises hand*
Thank you very much. :-)
Technically, this is similar to the GeoIP firewall stuff (just another database), so I assume most of the work done there can just be copied.
The GeoIP block uses an iptables extension which parses the database. We wouldn't use that here but would either build something with ipset or similar.
Hmmm, not sure how well this performs: If there is only a small AS with few IP ranges to parse, ipset would be sufficient.
However, if we have large networks (Level 3, Hurricane Electric, DTAG, ...), ipset might become slow and cause many iptables rules. And if we update the database (whomever created it), we need to reload the firewall rules. Using a database lookup module similar to GeoIP avoids that issues here, as far as I am concerned.
Best regards, Peter Müller
Any thoughts on this idea?
Best regards, Peter Müller
-Michael