iptablez

A collection of zsh functions and scriptlets to help build maintainable iptables rulesets

The Problem

iptables/netfilter is "procedural". You have to compile a ruleset adding rules one by one.

There are several approaches:

Create the ruleset from the command line directly. Optionally save using iptables-save and restore on boot. Not really maintainable.
Write a script to set up the rules for you. Problems: firewall is in indeterminate state while rules are being added. Scripts have a tendency to become byzantine. There are lots of repetitive elements. No good separation of "code" and "configuration" (such as access control lists).
Use some frontend like shorewall that abstracts away the iptables syntax in favour of its own, declarative one. Problem: doesn't necessarily expose all the flexibility of iptables/netfilter.

My solution

Using these zsh scripts, the firewall setup can be split into several small files: you can have files that define access control lists, files that set up configuration variables (such as symbolic names for IP addresses), and files that set up the effective rules (e.g. one chain per file, or whatever makes sense).

You can use (almost) the full power of the iptables command line, but instead of invoking iptables(8) directly, the script wraps it in a shell function; it builds a rule file loadable atomically by iptables-restore, avoiding any indeterminate state during initialisation.

There are many helper functions for common tasks like granting access to a service to a set of source IPs or ranges, denying others, and logging refused attempts subject to a rate limit; or getting the IP of an interface; etc. You're encouraged to browse the functions file.

Some example scriptlets are provided, for example to automatically block IPs that try to connect to {IP, port, protocol} tuples you know don't host a service.

Usage

Create /etc/iptablez/{conf,acl,ipset,script,pre,post}.d directories.

Symlink iptablez and functions into /etc/iptablez.

Create scriptlets in conf.d, script.d and post.d (optional).

Create ACL files in acl.d (one entry per line; empty lines ignored; comments starting with # supported; recursive includes supported: ". file" includes "file"; shell variables will be expanded, so you can do "-s $MYSERVER").

In conf.d files, you can look up names in DNS and assign the IPs to names in the following way:

get_ip_of some.hostname.here <default.ip> SHELL_VARIABLE

Example:

get_ip_of www.microsoft.com 2.17.245.133 WWW_MICROSOFT_COM

There is a disk-backed DNS cache with a configurable TTL; DNS lookups only actually happen if your firewall config references the SHELL_VARIABLE anywhere (so you can share conf.d snippets among hosts); and SHELL_VARIABLE is guaranteed to contain an IP, because the default IP is assigned to it if the lookup fails.

Call /etc/iptablez/iptablez to build and load your ruleset.

Dependencies

iptables (obviously).
zsh (obviously). Versions older than 5.0 may not work.
sed.
tryto(1) from the socklog package is used by some of the functions to enforce timeouts.
dnsip(1) from the djbdns package and dig(1) from the bind9-dnsutils package is needed by some of the functions.
installing the moreutils Debian package is recommended but not required (the ifdata(8) tool is used if it's available).

Limitations

Adding rules that reference hostnames that resolve to more than one IP will almost certainly not work at all (although the `get_ip_of() function will at least return one of the IPs the name resolved to). Workaround: look up the IPs beforehand and add rules using a loop.

TODO

Provide more and better examples, perhaps even a complete configuration.
Add ipv6 support (patches welcome).
Maybe add some helper functions for ip/tc?
Add support for tables other than filter, nat and mangle (probably not a big deal).
Review the code in functions. I wrote some of it in the early 2000's and would probably do it differently now.
- Improve the matching in get_ports_of() (can currently match anywhere on line, not just process name).

-- András Korn, 2013-08-24