Internet DRAFT - draft-gont-opsawg-firewalls-analysis
draft-gont-opsawg-firewalls-analysis
Operations Area Working Group F. Gont
Internet-Draft SI6 Networks / UTN-FRH
Intended status: Best Current Practice F. Baker
Expires: August 7, 2016 Cisco Systems
February 4, 2016
On Firewalls in Network Security
draft-gont-opsawg-firewalls-analysis-02
Abstract
This document analyzes the role of firewalls in network security, and
recognizes their role in the internet architecture. It suggests a
line of reasoning about their usage, and analyzes common kinds of
firewalls and the claims made for them.
Status of This Memo
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This Internet-Draft will expire on August 7, 2016.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Reasoning about Firewalls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.1. A Simple Model of Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.2. The Role of Firewalls in Internet Security . . . . . . . 5
3.3. Firewalls and The End-to-End Principle . . . . . . . . . 5
4. Common kinds of firewalls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.1. Perimeter security: Protection from aliens and intruders 7
4.2. Pervasive access control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4.3. Intrusion Management: Contract and Reputation filters . . 9
5. Firewalling Strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
5.1. Blocking Traffic Unless It Is Explicitly Allowed (default
deny) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
5.2. Allow Traffic Unless It Is Explicitly Blocked (default
allow) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
6. Assumptions on IP addresses and Transport Protocol Port
Numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
7. State Associated with Filtering Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
8. Enforcing Protocol Syntax at the Firewall . . . . . . . . . . 14
9. Performing Deep Packet Inspection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
10. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
11. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
12. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
13. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
13.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
13.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
1. Introduction
Prophylactic perimeter security in the form of firewalls, and the
proper use of them, have been a fractious sub-topic in the area of
internet security. Firewalls have been largely seen by many in the
IETF as a poor approach to security, and often as unnecessary and
rather "evil" devices that hinder innovation and the deployment of
new protocols and applications. Operationally, they are also seen by
some as attack vectors, with state exhaustion attacks, side-effects
of the imposition of symmetry requirements and single points of
failure. This document analyzes the role of firewalls in network
security, and recognizes their role in the internet architecture. It
suggests a line of reasoning about their usage, and analyzes common
kinds of firewalls and the claims made for them.
This document has, among others, the following goals:
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o Recognize the important role of firewalls in enterprise security
architecture for providing "prophylactic" security, rather than as
"evil" ad-hoc functionality/devices (see Section 3.2).
o Analyze common kinds of firewalls and claims made for them (see
Section 4).
o Analyze implicit assumptions made by firewalls, identifying where/
when some of those assumptions may not apply (see e.g.
Section 6).
o Discuss trade-offs in the possible firewalling paradigms (see
Section 5).
o Provide conceptual guidance regarding the use and deployment of .
o Identify harmful behavior/policies commonly implemented and
applied by firewalls, in the hopes of improving the state of
affairs in that area.
o Possibly trigger other work in the area of firewalls, as a result
of the previous items.
2. Terminology
Firewall:
A device or software that imposes a policy whose effect is "a
stated type of network traffic may or may not be allowed from A to
B". The firewall may reside in the destination itself (a "host
firewall"), or in any intermediate system (a "network firewall").
The firewalling functionality may be implemented in a general
purpose system (e.g. an ACL in a router), or in a special purpose
middleware device (e.g., a "firewall product"). The details of
the policy, the granularity with which a policy can be applied,
how such policy is configured, or of the firewall's implementation
are just that - implementation details.
We also note that a firewall may enforce policies at different
layers. Typically, the layer at which a firewall operates will
impact the type of policies that a firewall will be able to apply:
for example, a layer-3 firewall may be able to enforce simple
policies based on layer-3 addresses and some simple layer-4
parameters such as transport protocol port numbers, while an
"application firewall" may be able to enforce policies on higher-
level entities such as application-request types. We note that
all such firewall types essentially enforce the same role of
enforcing a policy of some sort on network traffic, and hence are
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referred to with the generic term "firewall" (or "firewall device"
in some cases) throughout this document.
Perimeter:
The position in which the specific security policy applies. In
typical deployed networks, there are usually some easy- to-define
perimeters. A network connected with another network has a
perimeter where the two meet, which is defined by what equipment
is operated by each network. It invariably imposes a security
policy at that boundary, which may be as simple as "all traffic is
welcome" and as complex as matching arriving and departing traffic
to ensure specific behaviors, or inspecting traffic according to
various algorithms. Firewall functionality is usually implemented
at or close to such network perimeters.
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].
3. Reasoning about Firewalls
3.1. A Simple Model of Communication
Any communication requires at least three components:
o a sender, someone or some thing that sends a message,
o a receiver, someone or some thing that receives the message, and
o a channel, which is a medium by which the message is communicated.
In the Internet, the IP network is the channel; it may traverse
something as simple as a directly connected cable or as complex as a
sequence of ISPs, but it is the means of communication. In normal
communications, a sender sends a message via the channel to the
receiver, who is willing to receive and operate on it. In contrast,
attacks are a form of harassment. A receiver exists, but is
unwilling to receive the message, has no application to operate on
it, or is by policy unwilling to. Attacks on infrastructure occur
when message volume overwhelms infrastructure or uses infrastructure
but has no obvious receiver.
By that line of reasoning, a firewall operating at layer-3 primarily
protects infrastructure, by preventing traffic that would attack it
from it. The best prophylactic might use a procedure for the
dissemination of Flow Specification Rules [RFC5575] to drop traffic
sent by an unauthorized or inappropriate sender or which has no host
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or application willing to receive it as close as possible to the
sender.
In other words, a firewall is comparable to the human skin, and has
as its primary purpose the prophylactic defense of a network. By
extension, the firewall also protects a set of hosts and
applications, and the bandwidth that serves them, as part of a
strategy of defense in depth. Since there is no one way to prevent
attacks, a firewall is not itself a security strategy; the analogy to
the skin would say that a body protected only by the skin has an
immune system deficiency and cannot be expected to long survive.
That said, every security solution has a set of vulnerabilities; the
vulnerabilities of a layered defense is the intersection of the
vulnerabilities of the various layers (e.g., a successful attack has
to thread each layer of defense).
3.2. The Role of Firewalls in Internet Security
One could compare the role of firewalls in prophylactic perimeter
security to that of the human skin: the service that the skin
performs for the rest of the body is to keep common crud out, and as
a result prevent much damage and infection that could otherwise
occur. The body supplies prophylactic perimeter security for itself
and then presumes that the security perimeter has been breached; real
defenses against attacks on the body include powerful systems that
detect changes (anomalies) counterproductive to human health, and
recognizable attack syndromes such as common or recently-seen
diseases. One might well ask, in view of those superior defenses,
whether there is any value in the skin at all; the value is easily
stated, however. It is not in preventing the need for the stronger
solutions, but in making their expensive invocation less needful and
more focused.
3.3. Firewalls and The End-to-End Principle
One common complaint about firewalls in general is that they violate
the End-to-End Principle [Saltzer]. The End-to-End Principle is
often incorrectly stated as requiring that "application specific
functions ought to reside in the end nodes of a network rather than
in intermediary nodes, provided they can be implemented 'completely
and correctly' in the end nodes" or that "there should be no state in
the network." What it actually says is heavily nuanced, and is a
line of reasoning applicable when considering any two communication
layers.
[Saltzer] "presents a design principle that helps guide placement
of functions among the modules of a distributed computer system.
The principle, called the end-to-end argument, suggests that
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functions placed at low levels of a system may be redundant or of
little value when compared with the cost of providing them at that
low level."
In other words, the End-to-End Argument is not a prohibition against
lower layer retries of transmissions, which can be important in
certain LAN technologies, nor of the maintenance of state, nor of
consistent policies imposed for security reasons. It is, however, a
plea for simplicity. Any behavior of a lower communication layer,
whether found in the same system as the higher layer (and especially
application) functionality or in a different one, that from the
perspective of a higher layer introduces inconsistency, complexity,
or coupling, extracts a cost. That cost may be in user satisfaction,
difficulty of management or fault diagnosis, difficulty of future
innovation, reduced performance, or something else. Such costs need
to be clearly and honestly weighed against the benefits expected, and
used only if the benefit outweighs the cost.
From that perspective, introduction of a policy that prevents
communication under an understood set of circumstances, whether it is
to prevent access to pornographic sites or to prevent traffic that
can be characterized as an attack, does not fail the End-to-End
Argument; there are any number of possible sites on the network that
are inaccessible at any given time, and the presence of such a policy
is easily explained and understood.
What does fail the End-to-End Argument is behavior that is
intermittent, difficult to explain, or unpredictable. If a site can
be reached sometimes and not at other times, or can be reached using
this host or application but not another, one will wonder why that is
the case, and may not even know where to look for the issue.
4. Common kinds of firewalls
There are at least three common kinds of firewalls:
o Context or Zone-based firewalls, that protect systems within a
perimeter from systems outside it,
o Pervasive routing-based measures, which protect intermingled
systems from each other by enforcing role-based policies, and
o Systems that analyze network traffic behavior and trigger on
events that are unusual, match a signature, or involve an
untrusted peer.
Each kind of firewall addresses a different view of the network. A
zone-based firewall (Section 4.1) views the network as containing
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zones of trust, and deems applications inside its zone of protection
to be trustworthy. A role-based firewall (Section 4.2) identifies
parties on the basis of membership in groups, and prevents
unauthorized communication between groups. A reputation, anomaly, or
signature-based intrusion management system (Section 4.3) depends on
active administration, and permits known applications to communicate
while excluding unknown or known-evil applications. In each case,
the host or application is its own final bastion of defense, but
having a host blocking incoming traffic (so-called "host firewalls")
does not defend infrastructure. That is, each type of prophylactic
has a purpose, and none of them is a complete prophylactic defense.
Each type of defense, however, can be assisted by enabling an
application running in a host to inform the network of what it is
willing to receive. As noted in Section 4.1, a zone-based firewall,
generally denies all incoming sessions and permits responses to
sessions initiated outbound from the zone, but can in some cases be
configured to also permit specific classes of incoming session
requests, such as WWW or SMTP to an appropriate server. A simple way
to enable a zone-based firewall to prevent attacks on infrastructure
(traffic to an un-instantiated address or to an application that is
off) while not impeding traffic that has a willing host and
application would be for the application to inform the firewall of
that willingness to receive incoming sessions. The Port Control
Protocol [RFC6887], or PCP, is an example of a protocol designed for
that purpose.
4.1. Perimeter security: Protection from aliens and intruders
As discussed in [RFC6092], the most common kind of firewall is used
at the perimeter of a network. Perimeter security assumes two
things: that applications and equipment inside the perimeter are
under the control of the local administration and are therefore
probably doing reasonable things, and that applications and equipment
outside the perimeter are unknown.
For example, it may enforce simple permission rules, such as that
external web clients are permitted to access a specific web server or
that external SMTP MTAs are permitted to access internal SMTP MTAs.
Apart from those rules, a session may be initiated from inside the
perimeter, and responses from outside will be allowed through the
firewall, but sessions may never be initiated from outside.
In addition, perimeter firewalls often perform some level of
inspection/analysis, either as application proxies or through deep
packet inspection, to verify that the protocol claimed to be being
passed is in fact the protocol being passed.
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In many scenarios the existence and definition of zone-based
perimeter defenses is arguably a side-effect of the deployment of
Network Address Translation [RFC2993]. Since e.g. a single address
is shared among multiple systems, the NAT device needs to translate
both the IP addresses and the transport protocol ports in order to
multiplex multiple communication instances from different nodes into
the same external address. Thus, the NAT device must keep a state
table to know how to translate the IP addresses and transport
protocol ports of incoming packets. Packets originating from the
internal network will either match an existing entry in the state
table, or create a new one. On the other hand, packets originating
in the external network will either match an existing entry in the
state table, or be dropped. Thus, as a side effect, NATs implicitly
require that communication be initiated from the internal network,
and only allow return traffic from the external network. We note
that this is a side-effect of multiplexing traffic from multiple
nodes on a single IP address, rather than a design goal of NAT
devices or their associated network translation function.
Some applications make the mistake of coupling application identities
to network layer addresses, and hence employ such addresses in the
application protocol. Thus, Network Address Translation forces the
translator to interpret packet payloads and change addresses where
used by applications.
As a result, if the transport or application headers are not
understood by the translator, this has the effect of damaging or
preventing communication. Detection of such issues can be sold as a
security feature, although it is really a side-effect of a failure.
While this can have useful side-effects, such as preventing the
passage of attack traffic that masquerades as some well-known
protocol, it also has the nasty side-effect of making innovation
difficult. This has slowed the deployment of SCTP [RFC4960], since a
firewall will often not permit a protocol it does not know even if a
user behind it opens the session. When a new protocol or feature is
defined, the firewall needs to stop applying that rule, and that can
be difficult to make happen.
4.2. Pervasive access control
Another access control model, often called "Role-based", tries to
control traffic in flight regardless of the perimeter. Given a rule
that equipment located in a given routing domain or with a specific
characteristic (such as "student dorms") should not be able to access
equipment in another domain or with a specific characteristic (such
as "academic records"), it might prevent routing from announcing the
second route in the domain of the first, or it might tag individual
packets ("I'm from the student dorm") and filter on those tags at
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enforcement points throughout network. Such rules can be applied to
individuals as well as equipment; in that case, the host needs to tag
the traffic, or there must be a reliable correlation between
equipment and its user.
One common use of this model is in data centers, in which physical or
virtual machines from one tenant (which is not necessarily an "owner"
as much as it is a context in which the system is used) might be co-
resident with physical or virtual machines from another. Inter-
tenant attacks, espionage, and fraud are prevented by enforcing a
rule that traffic from systems used by any given tenant is only
delivered to other systems used by the same tenant. This might, of
course have nuances; under stated circumstances, identified systems
or identified users might be able to cross such a boundary.
The major impediment in deployment is complexity. The administration
has the option to assign policies for individuals on the basis of
their current location (e.g. as the cross-product of people,
equipment, and topology), meaning that policies can multiply wildly.
The administrator that applies a complex role-based access policy is
probably most justly condemned to live in the world he or she has
created.
4.3. Intrusion Management: Contract and Reputation filters
The model proposed in Advanced Security for IPv6 CPE
[I-D.vyncke-advanced-ipv6-security] could be compared to purchasing
an anti-virus software package for one's computer. The proposal is
to install a set of filters, perhaps automatically updated, that
identify "bad stuff" and make it inaccessible, while not impeding
anything else.
It depends on four basic features:
o A frequently-updated signature-based Intrusion Prevention System
which inspects a pre-defined set of protocols at all layers (from
layer-3 to layer-7) and uses a vast set of heuristics to detect
attacks within one or several flows. Upon detection, the flow is
terminated and an event is logged for further optional auditing.
o A centralized reputation database that scores prefixes for degree
of trust. This is unlikely to be on addresses per se, since e.g.
temporary addresses [RFC4941] change regularly and frequently.
o Local correlation of attack-related information, and
o Global correlation of attacks seen, in a reputation database.
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The proposal does not mention anomaly-based intrusion detection,
which could be used to detect zero-day attacks and new applications
or attacks. This would be an obvious extension.
The comparison to anti-virus software is real; anti-virus software
uses similar algorithms, but on API calls or on data exchanged rather
than on network traffic, and for identified threats is often
effective.
The proposal also has weaknesses:
o People do not generally maintain anti-virus packages very well,
letting contracts expire,
o Reputation databases have a bad reputation for distributing
information which is incorrect, out of date, or compromised by
attackers,
o Anomaly-based analysis identifies changes but is often ineffective
in determining whether new application or application behaviors
are pernicious (false positives). Someone therefore has to
actively decide - a workload the average homeowner might have
little patience for, and
o Signature-based analysis applies to attacks that have been
previously identified, and must be updated as new attacks develop.
As a result, in a world in which new attacks literally arise
daily, the administrative workload can be intense, and reflexive
responses like accepting https certificates that are out of date
or the download and installation of unsigned software on the
assumption that the site administrator is behind are themselves
vectors for attack.
Security has to be maintained to be useful, because attacks are
maintained.
5. Firewalling Strategies
There is a great deal of tension in firewall policies between two
primary goals of networking: the security goal of "block traffic
unless it is explicitly allowed" and the networking goal of "trust
hosts with new protocols". The two inherently cannot coexist easily
in a set of policies for a firewall.
The following subsections discuss the "default deny" and "default
allow" security paradigms.
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5.1. Blocking Traffic Unless It Is Explicitly Allowed (default deny)
Many networks enforce the so-called "default deny" policy, in which
traffic is blocked unless it is explicitly allowed. The rationale
for such policy is that it is easier to open "holes" in a firewall to
allow specific protocols, than trying to block all protocols that
might be employed as an attack vectors; and that a network should
only support the protocols it has been explicitly meant to support.
The drawback of this approach is that the security goal of "block
traffic unless it is explicitly allowed" prevents useful new
applications. This problem has been seen repeatedly over the past
decade: a new and useful application protocol is specified, but it
cannot get wide adoption because it is blocked by firewalls. The
result has been a tendency to try to run new protocols over
established applications, particularly over HTTP [RFC3205]. The
result is protocols that do not work as well they might if they were
designed from scratch.
Worse, the same goal prevents the deployment of useful transports
other than TCP, UDP, and ICMP. A conservative firewall that only
knows those three transports will block new transports such as SCTP
[RFC4960]; this in turn causes the Internet to not be able to grow in
a healthy fashion. Many firewalls will also block TCP and UDP
options they don't understand, and this has the same unfortunate
result.
5.2. Allow Traffic Unless It Is Explicitly Blocked (default allow)
Some networks enforce the so-called "default allow" policy, in which
traffic is allowed unless it is explicitly blocked. This policy is
usually enforced at perimeters where a comprehensive security policy
is not really desirable or possible, but some level of packet
filtering is considered appropriate. One common example of such
policy could be an ISP blocking TCP port 25 (SMTP), but allowing all
other traffic.
When a strict security policy is to be enforced (e.g., at an
organizational network's edge), the "default allow" policy tends to
be rather inappropriate, since it is usually easier and more
effective to identify the traffic that must be allowed through the
firewall (and open the necessary "holes" in the firewall) than to
identify and block all traffic that may be considered undesirable/
inappropriate.
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6. Assumptions on IP addresses and Transport Protocol Port Numbers
In a number of scenarios, simple firewall rules have traditionally
been specified in terms of the associated IP addresses and transport
protocol port numbers. In general, this assumes that the associated
IP addresses are stable, and that there is a "well known" transport
protocol port number associated with each application.
In the IPv4 world, IP addresses may be considered rather stable.
However, IPv6 introduces the concept of "temporary addresses"
[RFC4941] which, by definition, change over time. This may prevent
the enforcement of filtering policies based on specific IPv6
addresses, or may lead to filtering based on a more coarse
granularity (e.g. specific address prefixes, as opposed to specific
IPv6 addresses). In some scenarios, from the point of view of
enforcing filtering policies, it might be desirable to disable
temporary addresses altogether.
For example, an administrator might prefer that a caching DNS
server, a secondary DNS server doing zone transfers, or an SMTP
MTA, always employ the same source IPv6 address, as opposed to the
temporary addresses that change over time.
The server-side transport protocol port is generally the so-called
"well-known port" corresponding to the associated application. While
widespread, this practice should probably be considered a kludge/
short-cut rather than a "design principle" that can be relied upon
for the general case. For example, use of DNS SRV records [RFC2782],
or applications such as "portmapper" [Portmap] [RFC1833] might mean
that the associated transport protocol port number cannot be assumed
to be well-known, but rather needs to be dynamically learned. In
other cases, applications may employ (by design) ephemeral port
numbers, and there may be no obvious way to dynamically learn the
port number being employed. FTP [RFC0959] and SIP [RFC3261] are
examples of such applications.
Finally, as a result of widespread packet filtering, many protocols
tend to be tunneled employing specific transport-protocol port
numbers that are known to be more generally allowed by firewalls,
such as TCP port 80 (HTTP). This essentially breaks the assumption
that port numbers actually identify the actual application protocol
using them.
Some of the so called "next generation" firewalls make fewer
assumptions about port numbers, and tend to analyze the application
data stream in order to infer the application protocol type,
regardless of the well-known port being used. While this may prevent
the circumvention of some security controls, it also implies Deep
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Packet Inspection (DPI), and therefore there are a number of
associated considerations, both in terms of introduced attack vectors
and other possibilities for evasion of security controls (please see
Section 9 for further discussion).
7. State Associated with Filtering Rules
There are two main paradigms for packet filtering:
o Stateless filtering
o Stateful filtering
Stateless filtering implies that the decision on whether to allow or
block a specific traffic entity is based solely on the contents of
such entity. One common example of such paradigm is the enforcement
of network ingress filtering [RFC2827], in which packets may be
blocked based on their IP addresses. Stateless filtering scales
well, since there are no state requirements on the filtering device
other than that associated with maintaining the filtering rules to be
applied to the incoming traffic entities (e.g., packets).
On the other hand, stateful filtering implies that the decision on
whether to allow or block a traffic entity is not only based on the
contents of such entity, but also on the existence (or lack of)
previous state associated with such entity. A common example of such
paradigm is a firewall that "allows outbound connection requests and
only allows return traffic from the external network" (such as the
policy implicitly enforced my most NAT devices). For obvious
reasons, the firewall needs to maintain state in order to be able to
enforce such policies; that is, the firewall may need to keep track
of all on-going communication instances, possibly applying timeouts
and garbage collection on the associated state table.
Stateful filtering tends to allow more powerful packet filtering, at
the expense of increased state. Thus, stateful filtering may be
desirable when trying to perform deep packet inspection, but may be
undesirable when the firewall is meant to block some Denial of
Service attacks, since the firewall itself may become "the weakest
link in the chain". Typically, the higher the firewall operates in
the network stack, the more state will be required associated. For
example, in order for a firewall to enforce a filtering policy based
on applcation-layer request types, the firewall will need to enforce
its filtering policy on the application-layer protocol stream, thus
implying the need to perform layer-3 and layer-4 reassembly, etc.
When stateful packet filtering is warranted, its associated security
implications should be considered. For example, an administrator may
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want to enforce traffic filtering to mitigate denial of service
attacks; however, when enforcement of such filtering implies
increased state at the firewall, the firewall itself may become the
easiest target for performing a denial of service attack.
8. Enforcing Protocol Syntax at the Firewall
Some firewalls try to enforce the protocol syntax by checking that
only traffic complying with existing protocol definitions is allowed.
While this can have useful side-effects, such as preventing the
aforementioned traffic from triggering pathological behavior at the
target system, it also has the nasty side-effect of making innovation
difficult. For example, one of the issues in the deployment of
Explicit Congestion Notification [RFC3168] has been that common
firewalls often inspect reserved/unused bits and require them to be
set to zero to close covert channels. Another example is the
plethora of filtering rules applied to DNS traffic [DNS-FILTERING].
When a new protocol or feature is defined, the firewall needs to stop
applying that rule, and that can be difficult to make happen.
NOTE:
A somewhat related concept is that of traffic normalization (or
"scrubbing"), in which the filtering device can "normalize"
traffic by e.g. clearing bits that are expected to be cleared,
changing some protocol fields such that they are within "normal"
ranges, etc. (see e.g. the discussion of "traffic normalization"
in [OpenBSD-PF]). While this can have the useful effect of
blocking DoS attacks to sloppy implementations that do not enforce
sanity checks on the received packets, it also has the nasty side-
effect of making innovation difficult, or even breaking deployed
protocols. For example, some firewalls are known enforce a
default packet normalization policy that clears the TCP URG bit,
as a result of the TCP urgent mechanism being associated with some
popular DoS attacks. Widespread deployment of such firewalls has
essentially rendered the TCP urgent mechanism unusable, leading to
its eventual formal deprecation in [RFC6093].
We note that, as per our definition of "firewall" in Section 2,
"traffic normalization" is not considered a firewall function.
9. Performing Deep Packet Inspection
While filtering packets based on the layer-3 protocol header fields
is rather simple and straight-forward, performing enforcing a
filtering policy at upper layer protocols can be a challenging task.
For example, IP fragmentation may make this task quite challenging,
since even the very layer-4 protocol header could be present in a
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non-first fragment. In a similar vein, IPv6 extension headers may
represent a challenge for a filtering device, since they can result
in long IPv6 extension header chains [RFC7112]
[I-D.gont-v6ops-ipv6-ehs-packet-drops].
This problem is exacerbated as one tries to filter packets based on
upper layer protocol contents, since many of such protocols implement
some form of fragmentation/segmentation and reassembly. In many
cases, the reassembly process could possibly lead to different
results, and this may be exploited by attackers for circumventing
security controls [Ptacek1998] [RFC6274].
In general, the upper in the protocol stack that a filtering policy
is to be enforced, the more complex the task becomes: an attacker has
more opportunities for obfuscation, ranging from e.g. ambiguities in
IP and/or TCP reassembly, to e.g. application-layer obfuscation (such
as HTTP URL obfuscation or JavaScript bytecode obfuscation). This
usually implies that, in order to reliably enforce a filtering
policy, more state is required on the firewall; and the
considerations in Section 7 should be evaluated.
10. IANA Considerations
This memo asks the IANA for no new parameters. It can before
publication as an RFC by the RFC Editor.
11. Security Considerations
This documents recognizes the role of firewalls in network security,
and discusses a number of considerations associated with firewalls
which may be of use when designing or deploying firewalls. This
document, by itself, does not introduce any security implications.
12. Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank (in alphabetical order) Fleming
Andraeson, Mark Andrews, Lee Howard, Joel Jaeggli, Al Morton, Eric
Vyncke and James Woodyatt, for providing valuable comments on earlier
versions of this document.
This document is based on [I-D.ietf-opsawg-firewalls-00] authored by
Fred Baker, and [I-D.ietf-opsawg-firewalls-01] authored by Paul
Hoffman.
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13. References
13.1. Normative References
[RFC1833] Srinivasan, R., "Binding Protocols for ONC RPC Version 2",
RFC 1833, DOI 10.17487/RFC1833, August 1995,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1833>.
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.
[RFC3205] Moore, K., "On the use of HTTP as a Substrate", BCP 56,
RFC 3205, DOI 10.17487/RFC3205, February 2002,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3205>.
[RFC4941] Narten, T., Draves, R., and S. Krishnan, "Privacy
Extensions for Stateless Address Autoconfiguration in
IPv6", RFC 4941, DOI 10.17487/RFC4941, September 2007,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4941>.
[RFC6887] Wing, D., Ed., Cheshire, S., Boucadair, M., Penno, R., and
P. Selkirk, "Port Control Protocol (PCP)", RFC 6887,
DOI 10.17487/RFC6887, April 2013,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6887>.
[RFC7112] Gont, F., Manral, V., and R. Bonica, "Implications of
Oversized IPv6 Header Chains", RFC 7112,
DOI 10.17487/RFC7112, January 2014,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7112>.
13.2. Informative References
[DNS-FILTERING]
Andrews, M., "On Firewalls in Internet Security (Fwd: New
Version Notification for draft-gont-opsawg-firewalls-
analysis-00.txt)", post to the OPSAWG mailing-list,
Message-Id: <20151012002551.8F7CD3A2FFD8@rock.dv.isc.org>,
2015, <https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/
opsawg/2YQl6xBz6jtMyIkyAx59U-oPmPQ>.
[I-D.gont-v6ops-ipv6-ehs-packet-drops]
Gont, F., Hilliard, N., Doering, G., LIU, S., and W.
Kumari, "Operational Implications of IPv6 Packets with
Extension Headers", draft-gont-v6ops-ipv6-ehs-packet-
drops-02 (work in progress), February 2016.
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[I-D.ietf-opsawg-firewalls-00]
Baker, F., "On Firewalls in Internet Security", draft-
ietf-opsawg-firewalls-00 (work in progress), June 2012.
[I-D.ietf-opsawg-firewalls-01]
Baker, F. and P. Hoffman, "On Firewalls in Internet
Security", draft-ietf-opsawg-firewalls-01 (work in
progress), October 2012.
[I-D.vyncke-advanced-ipv6-security]
Vyncke, E., Yourtchenko, A., and M. Townsley, "Advanced
Security for IPv6 CPE", draft-vyncke-advanced-
ipv6-security-03 (work in progress), October 2011.
[OpenBSD-PF]
OpenBSD, , "pf(4) manual page: pf -- packet filter", 2015,
<http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-
current/man4/pf.4&query=pf>.
[Portmap] Wikipedia, , "Portmap", 2014,
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmap>.
[Ptacek1998]
Ptacek, T. and T. Newsham, "Insertion, Evasion and Denial
of Service: Eluding Network Intrusion Detection", 1998,
<http://www.aciri.org/vern/Ptacek-Newsham-Evasion-98.ps>.
[RFC0959] Postel, J. and J. Reynolds, "File Transfer Protocol",
STD 9, RFC 959, DOI 10.17487/RFC0959, October 1985,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc959>.
[RFC2782] Gulbrandsen, A., Vixie, P., and L. Esibov, "A DNS RR for
specifying the location of services (DNS SRV)", RFC 2782,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2782, February 2000,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2782>.
[RFC2827] Ferguson, P. and D. Senie, "Network Ingress Filtering:
Defeating Denial of Service Attacks which employ IP Source
Address Spoofing", BCP 38, RFC 2827, DOI 10.17487/RFC2827,
May 2000, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2827>.
[RFC2993] Hain, T., "Architectural Implications of NAT", RFC 2993,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2993, November 2000,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2993>.
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[RFC3168] Ramakrishnan, K., Floyd, S., and D. Black, "The Addition
of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP",
RFC 3168, DOI 10.17487/RFC3168, September 2001,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3168>.
[RFC3261] Rosenberg, J., Schulzrinne, H., Camarillo, G., Johnston,
A., Peterson, J., Sparks, R., Handley, M., and E.
Schooler, "SIP: Session Initiation Protocol", RFC 3261,
DOI 10.17487/RFC3261, June 2002,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3261>.
[RFC4960] Stewart, R., Ed., "Stream Control Transmission Protocol",
RFC 4960, DOI 10.17487/RFC4960, September 2007,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4960>.
[RFC5575] Marques, P., Sheth, N., Raszuk, R., Greene, B., Mauch, J.,
and D. McPherson, "Dissemination of Flow Specification
Rules", RFC 5575, DOI 10.17487/RFC5575, August 2009,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5575>.
[RFC6092] Woodyatt, J., Ed., "Recommended Simple Security
Capabilities in Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) for
Providing Residential IPv6 Internet Service", RFC 6092,
DOI 10.17487/RFC6092, January 2011,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6092>.
[RFC6093] Gont, F. and A. Yourtchenko, "On the Implementation of the
TCP Urgent Mechanism", RFC 6093, DOI 10.17487/RFC6093,
January 2011, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6093>.
[RFC6274] Gont, F., "Security Assessment of the Internet Protocol
Version 4", RFC 6274, DOI 10.17487/RFC6274, July 2011,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6274>.
[Saltzer] Saltzer, J., Reed, D., and D. Clark, "End-to-end arguments
in system design", ACM Transactions on Computer Systems
(TOCS) v.2 n.4, p277-288, Nov 1984.
Authors' Addresses
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Fernando Gont
SI6 Networks / UTN-FRH
Evaristo Carriego 2644
Haedo, Provincia de Buenos Aires 1706
Argentina
Phone: +54 11 4650 8472
Email: fgont@si6networks.com
URI: http://www.si6networks.com
Fred Baker
Cisco Systems
Santa Barbara, California 93117
USA
Email: fred@cisco.com
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