Basic Iptables Firewall on Centos 6

Block the most common attacks

DigitalOcean VPSs usually come with the empty configuration: all traffic is allowed. Just to make sure of this, we can flush the firewall rules - that is, erase them all:

iptables -F

We can then add a few simple firewall rules to block the most common attacks, to protect our VPS from script-kiddies. We can't really count on iptables alone to protect us from a full-scale DDOS or similar, but we can at least put off the usual network scanning bots that will eventually find our VPS and start looking for security holes to exploit. First, we start with blocking null packets.

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --tcp-flags ALL NONE -j DROP

We told the firewall to take all incoming packets with tcp flags NONE and just DROP them. Null packets are, simply said, recon packets. The attack patterns use these to try and see how we configured the VPS and find out weaknesses. The next pattern to reject is a syn-flood attack.

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp ! --syn -m state --state NEW -j DROP

Syn-flood attack means that the attackers open a new connection, but do not state what they want (ie. SYN, ACK, whatever). They just want to take up our servers' resources. We won't accept such packages. Now we move on to one more common pattern: XMAS packets, also a recon packet.

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --tcp-flags ALL ALL -j DROP

We have ruled out at least some of the usual patterns that find vulnerabilities in our VPS.

Open up ports for selected services

Now we can start adding selected services to our firewall filter. The first such thing is a localhost interface:

iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT

We tell iptables to add (-A) a rule to the incoming (INPUT) filter table any trafic that comes to localhost interface (-i lo) and to accept (-j ACCEPT) it. Localhost is often used for, ie. your website or email server communicating with a database locally installed. That way our VPS can use the database, but the database is closed to exploits from the internet.

Now we can allow web server traffic:

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT

We added the two ports (http port 80, and https port 443) to the ACCEPT chain - allowing traffic in on those ports. Now, let's allow users use our SMTP servers:

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 25 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 465 -j ACCEPT

Like stated before, if we can influence our users, we should rather use the secure version, but often we can't dictate the terms and the clients will connect using port 25, which is much more easier to have passwords sniffed from. We now proceed to allow the users read email on their server:

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 110 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 995 -j ACCEPT

Those two rules will allow POP3 traffic. Again, we could increase security of our email server by just using the secure version of the service. Now we also need to allow IMAP mail protocol:

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 143 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 993 -j ACCEPT

We should also allow SSH traffic, so we can connect to the VPS remotely. The simple way to do it would be with this command:

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT

We now told iptables to add a rule for accepting tcp traffic incomming to port 22 (the default SSH port). It is advised to change the SSH configuration to a different port, and this firewall filter should be changed accordingly, but configuring SSH is not a part of this article.

However, we could do one more thing about that with firewall itself. If our office has a permanent IP address, we could only allow connections to SSH from this source. This would allow only people from our location to connect.

First, find out your outside IP address. Make sure it is not an address from your LAN, or it will not work. You could do that simply by visiting the whatismyip.com site. Another way to find it out is to type:

w

in the terminal, we should see us logged in (if we're the only one logged in' and our IP address written down.

The output looks something like this:

root@server# w
11:42:59 up 60 days, 11:21,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
root   pts/0    203.191.xxx.xxx  09:27    0.00s  0.05s  0.00s w

Now, you can create the firewall rule to only allow traffic to SSH port if it comes from one source: your IP address:

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -s YOUR_IP_ADDRESS -m tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT

Replace YOUR_IP_ADDRESS with the actuall IP, of course.

We could open more ports on our firewall as needed by changing the port numbers. That way our firewall will allow access only to services we want. Right now, we need to add one more rule that will allow us to use outgoing connections (ie. ping from VPS or run software updates);

iptables -I INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT

It will allow any established outgoing connections to receive replies from the VPS on the other side of that connection. When we have it all set up, we will block everything else, and allow all outgoing connections.

iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
iptables -P INPUT DROP

Now we have our firewall rules in place.

Now that we have all the configuration in, we can list the rules to see if anything is missing.

iptables -L -n

The -n switch here is because we need only ip addresses, not domain names. Ie. if there is an IP in the rules like this: 144.48.111.5: the firewall would go look it up and see that it was a digitalocean.com IP. We don't need that, just the address itself. Now we can finally save our firewall configuration:

iptables-save | sudo tee /etc/sysconfig/iptables

The iptables configuration file on CentOS is located at /etc/sysconfig/iptables. The above command saved the rules we created into that file. Just to make sure everything works, we can restart the firewall:

service iptables restart

The saved rules will persist even when the VPS is rebooted.