Manage docker containers firewall with UFW!
If you use docker, you may know docker's publish port function (for example: docker -p 8080:80 ) directly talks to iptables and update rules accordingly.
This conflicts with Ubuntu/Debian's ufw firewall manager and makes it useless. (Same on Centos/Redhat/Fedora's firewalld) In other words, ufw doesn't know about their secret talk, and only do what he knows. This creates a big confusion around UFW & Docker firewall issue.
To fix this issue lot of people argued that it's either docker's problem or not. Nevertheless docker didn't "fix" the issue. Fortunately some smart people found the solution to this problem and my favorite one is ufw-docker. You can read more about it on the project's readme.
Original ufw-docker project is very easy to use, but requires manual work and doesn't track container IP changes. If original container's IP changes somehow, your rule will be invalid.
To make it automated I hacked together some crap and it actually works. Now if you want to manage your docker container's firewall with your favorite tool ufw all you have to do is run your container with UFW_MANAGED=TRUE label. For example: docker run -d -p 8080:80 -l UFW_MANAGED=TRUE nginx:alpine
I've also added example code in an examples folder.
Step 1. Install ufw-docker's firewall rules on your ufw configuration file.
Open up /etc/ufw/after.rules file and add following code to the bottom of the file.
# BEGIN UFW AND DOCKER
*filter
:ufw-user-forward - [0:0]
:ufw-docker-logging-deny - [0:0]
:DOCKER-USER - [0:0]
-A DOCKER-USER -j ufw-user-forward
-A DOCKER-USER -j RETURN -s 10.0.0.0/8
-A DOCKER-USER -j RETURN -s 172.16.0.0/12
-A DOCKER-USER -j RETURN -s 192.168.0.0/16
-A DOCKER-USER -p udp -m udp --sport 53 --dport 1024:65535 -j RETURN
-A DOCKER-USER -j ufw-docker-logging-deny -p tcp -m tcp --tcp-flags FIN,SYN,RST,ACK SYN -d 192.168.0.0/16
-A DOCKER-USER -j ufw-docker-logging-deny -p tcp -m tcp --tcp-flags FIN,SYN,RST,ACK SYN -d 10.0.0.0/8
-A DOCKER-USER -j ufw-docker-logging-deny -p tcp -m tcp --tcp-flags FIN,SYN,RST,ACK SYN -d 172.16.0.0/12
-A DOCKER-USER -j ufw-docker-logging-deny -p udp -m udp --dport 0:32767 -d 192.168.0.0/16
-A DOCKER-USER -j ufw-docker-logging-deny -p udp -m udp --dport 0:32767 -d 10.0.0.0/8
-A DOCKER-USER -j ufw-docker-logging-deny -p udp -m udp --dport 0:32767 -d 172.16.0.0/12
-A DOCKER-USER -j RETURN
-A ufw-docker-logging-deny -m limit --limit 3/min --limit-burst 10 -j LOG --log-prefix "[UFW DOCKER BLOCK] "
-A ufw-docker-logging-deny -j DROP
COMMIT
# END UFW AND DOCKER
Step 2. Reload your ufw service to take effect of new configuration.
sudo ufw reload
# or
sudo service ufw restart
# or
sudo systemctl restart ufw
Step 3. Install my crap
Make sure you have python 3.6 and pip installed. Then you can either clone the repo or just copy the ufw-docker-automated.py file to your machine.
Then install the docker SDK for python by running: pip install docker and you're good to go.
Step 4. Create new systemd service entry
You may want to run this python script as background process and make it runnable on system boot to make sense of it. To do that, you can create new systemd service entry.
Create and open new file on the following path /lib/systemd/system/ufw-docker-automated.service and copy the following content, don't forget to update the script path.
[Unit]
Description=Ufw docker automated
Documentation=https://github.com/shinebayar-g/ufw-docker-automated
After=network-online.target ufw.service containerd.service
Wants=network-online.target
Requires=ufw.service
[Service]
# Script requires run as root or sudo user to manage ufw!
User=root
# Path to your python executable and actual location of the script
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 /home/ubuntu/ufw-docker-automated.py
Restart=always
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Step 5. Enable the systemd service and start it
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable ufw-docker-automated
sudo systemctl start ufw-docker-automated
Step 6. Profit
Run your containers with UFW_MANAGED=TRUE label. Script will automatically adds and removes necessary ufw rules based on the published ports.
For example:
➜ docker run -d -p 8080:80 -l UFW_MANAGED=TRUE nginx:alpine
13a6ef724d92f404f150f5796dabfd305f4e16a9de846a67e5e99ba53ed2e4e7
will add following entry to ufw list.
➜ sudo ufw status
Status: active
To Action From
-- ------ ----
22 ALLOW Anywhere
80/tcp ALLOW Anywhere
443/tcp ALLOW Anywhere
172.17.0.2 80/tcp ALLOW FWD Anywhere <= this baby added
Once you stop the container, ufw entry will be gone.
➜ docker stop 13a6ef724d92
13a6ef724d92
➜ sudo ufw status
Status: active
To Action From
-- ------ ----
22 ALLOW Anywhere
80/tcp ALLOW Anywhere
443/tcp ALLOW Anywhere