Today, one of the most important topics in the computation world is security. How to improve security in a single or interconnected machine is sometimes hard to understand and difficult to implement. In this article, I will discuss how to implement a simple firewall on a Linux machine using IP chains.

IP chains could be new to users who upgraded their 2.0.36 kernels to the 2.2.x series, but old to those who worked in the 2.1.x series. ipchains is a rewrite of the well-known ipfwadm, which was a rewrite of BSD's ipfw, and was used to build firewalls in 2.0.x kernels. The are many reasons for this rewrite but perhaps the most important is ipfwadm couldn't allow protocols other than TCP, UDP or ICMP and it didn't handle fragments.

Linux IP firewall chaining software is a program that uses the kernel IP packet filtering capability. A packet filter looks at the header of a packet and decides the fate of the entire packet. It can decide to DENY the packet (discard the packet as if it had never received it), ACCEPT (let the packet pass through), or REJECT (like deny, but notify the source of the packet).

When you build your firewall you are looking for control and security of your network, and good firewall scripts are the key to this objective's success. If you are constantly receiving a ping flood from a specific IP address, you can deny all packets received from that IP, by creating a chain with this policy. ipchains is able to read the policies of the scripts and give instructions to the IP packet filtering as to how to handle the incoming/outcoming packets.

First, your kernel must be able to use IP chains. Look for the file /proc/net/ip_fwchains, if it exists, everything is okay. If not, you need to recompile your kernel and set these options:

CONFIG_FIREWALL=y
CONFIG_IP_FIREWALL=y

Next you need to know the syntax of ipchains necessary to create functional scripts. Let's imagine a hypothetical file called scriptf with some rules :

ipchains -N ippolicy
ipchains -I input -j ippolicy
ipchains -A ippolicy -p icmp -s 198.162.1.2 -j\
   DENY
ipchains -A ippolicy -p TCP -t 200.241.233.1
-j\
   DENY

/etc/rc.d/init.d/scritpf

ipchains -F ippolicy

Ip chains is a very powerful tool that allows you to create many complex rules in order to protect your network. Just for fun, I built a small C program to build simple firewall scripts and simplify the rc.d process. It is open source and available at linuxgo.persogo.com.br/ipchains.html. Good places to get more information on how to build great scripts are the HOWTOs (see Resources). Read them before you start to build your own firewall scripts.

Resources