Whitelisting Under Shorewall

Tom Eastep

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License”.

2005/09/30



For a brief time, the 1.2 version of Shorewall supported an /etc/shorewall/whitelist file. This file was intended to contain a list of IP addresses of hosts whose POLICY to all zones was ACCEPT. The whitelist file was implemented as a stop-gap measure until the facilities necessary for implementing white lists using zones was in place. As of Version 1.3 RC1, those facilities were available.

White lists are most often used to give special privileges to a set of hosts within an organization. Let us suppose that we have the following environment:

The basic approach will be that we will place the operations staff's class C in its own zone called ops. Here are the appropriate configuration files:

Zone File

ZONEDISPLAYCOMMENTS
net NetInternet
ops OperationsOperations Staff's Class C
loc LocalLocal Class B
dmz DMZDemilitarized zone

The ops zone has been added to the standard 3-zone zones file -- since ops is a sub-zone of loc, we list it BEFORE loc.

Interfaces File

ZONEINTERFACEBROADCASTOPTIONS
net eth0 <whatever><options>
dmz eth1 <whatever> 
- eth2 10.10.255.255  

Because eth2 interfaces to two zones (ops and loc), we don't specify a zone for it here.

Hosts File

ZONEHOST(S)OPTIONS
ops eth2:10.10.10.0/24  
loc eth2:0.0.0.0/0  

Here we define the ops and loc zones. When Shorewall is stopped, only the hosts in the ops zone will be allowed to access the firewall and the DMZ. I use 0.0.0.0/0 to define the loc zone rather than 10.10.0.0/16 so that the limited broadcast address (255.255.255.255) falls into that zone. If I used 10.10.0.0/16 then I would have to have a separate entry for that special address.

Policy File

SOURCEDESTPOLICYLOG LEVELLIMIT BURST
ops all ACCEPT   
all ops CONTINUE   
loc net ACCEPT   
net all DROP info  
all all REJECT info  

Two entries for ops (in bold) have been added to the standard 3-zone policy file.

Rules File

ACTIONSOURCEDESTPROTODEST PORT(S)SOURCE PORT(S)ORIGINAL DEST
REDIRECT loc!ops 3128 tcp http   
...       

This is the rule that transparently redirects web traffic to the transparent proxy running on the firewall. The SOURCE column explicitly excludes the ops zone from the rule.

Routestopped File

INTERFACEHOST(S))
eth1  
eth2 10.10.10.0/24