Firewalls

Written by Kyle, Edited by Brooke and Rasim.

Introduction

A firewall is one of the most basic forms of network security. Firewalls control incoming and outgoing network traffic and can be hardware or software based. Every firewall has a specific set of rules that define what machines are allowed access to the network. All machines that do not meet the rules are denied access to the firewall. With the rise of the internet in the 1980's, Access Control Lists that simply stated which IP Addresses were allowed on the network did not provide sufficient security. This gave way to firewalls, of which there are three types. [wif]

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A Short History of Firewalls

As mentioned previously, the need for firewalls arose when the internet made machines more connected, and less secure, than ever before. Prior to firewalls most security was controlled by Access Control Lists. These lists existed on routers and determined which IP addresses were allowed on the server. This became not only not secure enough, but not feasible when hundreds of machines are attempting to access my machine. Therefore looking at the sources of packets was no longer enough. It was now necessary to look at the packets themselves. The first commercial firewall was shipped by Digital Equipment Corp in 1992. Since then both firewalls and the attacks that they are preventing have become increasingly sophisticated.

Types of Firewalls [tof]

Packet Filtering

Packet filtering is a network layer form of firewall. This kind of firewall was commonly used in the earliest firewalls. As we know information travels through networks in 'packets.' Packet filtering firewalls control access to the network based on source and destination addresses, and the ports on which the packets are travelling. These firewalls do not look at the contents of the packets and have limited logging capabilities.

Proxy

A proxy firewall passes packets through 'proxy' applications that are separate from the network. This process is a bit more complicated than packet filtering. A proxy firewall prevents a users network from directly accessing the internet. Instead the proxy application accesses the internet and passes the pages to the user. Proxy firewalls can detect application information along with the surface level information that packet filtering can detect. This requires more resources and is slower than the simpler packet filtering. It is, however, more secure. Along with increased security, another advantage of proxy firewall is the increased logging capabilities. This makes it possible to discover information about the data contained within packets.

Stateful Inspection

Stateful inspection firewalls are fast and intelligent. They examine packets at the network layer similar to packet filtering, but analyze the sequence of the connection to ensure that the communications follow a set protocol from beginning to end.

Hybrid Firewalls

Most modern day firewalls provide a hybrid of these sorts of systems. This mixture of methods increases security greatly.

Vulnerablilities

There are many ways in which a firewall can fail and leave a user vulnerable to attacks. As stated previously only proxy firewalls check packets on an application level. This means that the others leave users vulnerable to applications which can be harmful making their way through a firewall even if they come from trusted sources on trusted ports. Many exe files contain viruses and worms and can make it through packet filtering and stateful inspection firewalls. Other vulnerabilities include having outdated hardware and software, insecure passwords, unencrypted http connections, insufficient logging, and poor security management and documentation. [cff]

PrettyPark

A successful bypass of firewall in the past was done by a trojan horse called PrettyPark. This trojan horse bypassed firewalls by being an application attached in an email. When the application was executed it displayed the screensaver and emails itself to contacts in the users address book every 30 minutes. This attack targeted systems that did not have firewalls that protected them on the application level. This allowed the systems to be targeted through email. [ppw]

RDS Firewall on AWS

An example of a firewall that we have already set up is on our RDS service on Amazon Web Services. If you open up an RDS instance you can select See Details.

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On the following page select Security Groups.

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At the bottom of the next page there are three tabs, we want to edit the Inbound Security groups. We can also manage our firewall for Outbound connections, but let's focus on Inbound for now.

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In our stack we are using MySql, and therefore this is what we have selected as our type of security group. This selection automatically sets our firewall protocol to TCP and only allows communication on port 3306 for our database connection. Any requests that do not follow TCP or are trying to communicate on ports other than port 3306 will not be allowed on the network.

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On the right side of this popup there is a source section. This section allows for users to set specific IP addresses that are allowed to send inbound packets. If there are no restrictions, as in the image, any machine may communicate to the database. This is not ideal, and this field can be changed to only allow known machines that need to communicate with the database.

All of this can also be set for outbound packets as well. This is an example of a stateful inspection firewall that is incredibly easy to set up and use. It checks that communication is following a set protocol, happening on a specific port, and is coming from trusted sources. As mentioned previously, under the Outbound tab a firewall can be set up for outgoing connections just as easily.

Sources

[cff]Kevin Beaver. "Top 10 Common Firewall Flaws" Algosec. 16 Jul. 2015. Web. 21 Feb. 2017.
[ppw]"PrettyPark.Worm." Symantec Corporation. 4 Jun. 1999. Web 21 Feb. 2017.
[tof]"Types of Firewall." Black Box Network Services. Web. 21 Feb. 2017
[wif]Margaret Rouse, Michael Cobb. "What is Firewall?" Whatis.com Nov. 2014. Web. 21 Feb. 2017.