Lance Spitzner
Last Modified:  December 9, 1999

Building a solid rulebase is a critical, if not the most critical, step in implementing a successful  and secure firewall.  Security admins and experts all over  the Internet argue what platforms and applications make the best firewalls.   We compare stateful inspection tables, application based filtering, fragmentation and reassembly, etc.  However, all of this is meaningless if your firewall rulebase is misconfigured.  Far too often in my security audits I see $50,000 firewalls exposing organizations to great risk, all because of a misconfigured rule.  That is the purpose of this paper, to help you plan, build, and maintain a solid and secure firewall rulebase.  The information covered here applies to most firewalls, but I will be using Check Point FireWall-1 as an example. Regardless of what type of firewall you use, the basic concepts of rulebase design remain the same.

The Key to Success

Before we jump in, I would like to share with you the key to success, simplicity.  The key to a secure firewall is a simple rulebase.  Your organization's number one enemy is a misconfiguration.  Why should the badguys try to sneak spoofed, fragmented packets past your firewall when you have accidentally left imap wide open?  To keep your rulebase simple, keep it short.  The more rules you have, the more likely you or someone else will make a mistake.  The fewer rules your rulebase has, the easier it is to understand and maintain.  By keeping your rulebase short and simple, you have won half the battle.  A good rule of thumb is to have no more then 30 rules.  With 30 rules, its relatively easy to understand what is going on.  Between 30 and 50 rules, things become confusing, the odds grow exponentially that something will be misconfigured.  Anything over 50 rules and you end up fighting a losing battle.  I personally have witnessed organizations with over 300 rules in their rulebase, nobody (including myself) had a clue as to what was going on.  When you start having this many rules, you need to take a serious look at your overall security architecture, and not just your firewalls.   The moral of the story is, the fewer rules you have, the simpler your rulebase and the less likely you are to have misconfigurations (and a more secure firewall).

Fewer rules have the added bonus of improving performance. By parsing only a small number of rules, your firewall saves CPU cycles. Most firewalls are extremelly efficient, so you will see little difference. But it can never hurt.

Building Your Rulebase

So, how do we build a secure rulebase?  Well, we will do just that in this paper.  We will go through step by step and build a firewall rulebase.  We will start with a fictional organization's security policy. Based on that policy, we will then develop a firewall rulebase.  Along the way, I will cover some of the Do's and Don'ts of rulebase configuration.  Also, we will cover rules that every firewall should have.  Hopefully by the end of the paper you will have a better understanding of how to build a secure rulebase for your organization.

The Security Policy

Remember, your firewall (and your firewall rulebase) are nothing more then a technical implementation of your security policy.  Management builds the security policy, which defines what is to be enforced.  The firewall is a technical tool, which is how the policy gets enforced.  So, before we start building our rulebase, we have to understand our security policy.  Since this paper focuses on rulebase design, we will keep our security policy relatively simple. Fortunately for us, our organization has a simple security policy, which management has outlined as follows.

1. Internal employees are allowed unrestricted access to the Internet.
2. Provide the Internet access to the company's webserver and Internet email
3. Any traffic coming into the corporate internal network must be securely authenticated and encrypted

The Security Architecture

As a security administrator, our first step is converting the security policy to security architecture.  Lets now go through and convert each security policy bullet into technical implementation.

1. The first one is easy.  Anything from the internal network is allowed outbound to the Internet.
2. The second security policy bullet gets tricky.  We are required to set up both a web and mail server for the company.  We will do this by putting them in a DMZ.  A DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) is a separate network where you put systems you do not trust.  Since anyone on the Internet will be accessing both our web and mail server, we cannot trust them.  Also, systems in the DMZ can never initiate connections to the internal network, since they are not trusted.  There are two kinds of DMZs, protected and unprotected.  Protected DMZ's are a separate segment off the firewall.  Unprotected DMZs are the network segment between the router and the firewall.  I prefer to use protected DMZs, so that is where we will place both our mail and web server.
3. The only traffic that we have coming from the Internet to our internal network is remote administration.  We have to give our system admins remote access to their systems.  We will do this by allowing only the encrypted service ssh into our internal network.
4. There is one additional goody we have to add, DNS.  Though not stated in our security policy, we have to provide this service.  Being the secure admins we are, we will implement Split DNS.  Split DNS means to split the functionality of DNS on two different servers.  We will do this by using an External DNS server that the Internet will use to resolve our company's domain information, and an Internal DNS server that our internal users will use.  The External DNS server will be placed on the protected DMZ with the mail and web server.  The Internal DNS server will be placed on the Internal network.  This protects our Internal DNS server from being compromised by the Internet.  The Internal DNS server has information which could be used to map our internal network.

Rule Order.

Before we begin building our rulebase, there is one thing I want to cover, rule order.  As you will soon learn, which rules go in what order are critical.  Having the same rules, but placing them in a different order, can radically alter how your firewall works.  Many firewalls (such as SunScreen EFS, Cisco IOS, and FW-1) work by inspecting packets in a sequential manner.  When your firewall receives a packet, it compares it against the first rule, then the second, then the third, etc.  When it finds a rule that matches, it stops checking and applies that rule.  If the packet goes through each rule without finding a match, then that packet is denied.  It is critical to understand that the first rule that matches is applied to the packet, not the rule that best matches.  Based on this, I like to keep the more specific rules first, the more general rules last. This prevents a general rule being matched before hitting a more specific rule. This helps protect your firewall from misconfigurations.

The Rulebase

Time to get to the good stuff, building the rulebase!  Below I have briefly outlined each rule, why I selected that rule, and the importance it has.  To go into more detail on the rule (including a picture of the rulebase), follow the links.
 

1. Default Properties:  The first step is to eliminate anything that is allowed.  We want to be sure we are starting with a clean slate and no packets are getting through.  Unfortunately, CheckPoint FireWall-1 comes with a variety of services wide open, by default.  Our first step is to turn off these default properties.
2. Internal Outbound:  Our first rule is to allow anyone on the internal network outbound.  As stated in the security policy, all services are allowed.
3. Lockdown:  Now we add our lockdown rule, blocking any access to the firewall.  This is a standard rule that every rulebase should have.  No one should have access to the firewall but the firewall admins. 
4. Admin Access:  No one can connect to the firewall, including the admins.  We have to create a rule allowing administrative access to the firewalls.
5. Drop All: By default, FW-1 drops all packets that do not match any rules.  However, these packets are not logged.  We change this by creating a Drop All AND Log rule and add it to the end of the rulebase.  This is a standard rule that every rulebase should have.
6. No Logging:  Often there is a great deal of broadcast traffic on the network that the firewall drops and logs, which can quickly fill up the logs.  We create a rule that drops/rejects this traffic, but does NOT log it.  This is a standard rule base that you may want to use.
7. DNS  Access:  We want to give Internet users DNS access to our DNS server..
8. Mail Access:  We want to give Internet and internal users smtp access to our mail server.
9. Web access:  We want to give Internet and internal users http access to our  web server.
10. Block DMZ:  Our internal users have wide open access to our DMZ, which we need to stop.
11. Internal POP Access:  Give our internal users POP access to the mail server.
12. Sneaky Rule:  Your DMZ should never initiate traffic to your internal network.  If your DMZ does, this may mean your DMZ was compromised.  I like to add a rule that denies, logs, and alerts me whenever there is any traffic from the DMZ to my internal network.
13. Admin Access:  We give our admins (limited to specific source IPs) encrypted access to the internal network.
14. Performance:  Last, we review our rulebase for performance. When possible, move your most commonly used rules towards the top of the rulebase. This improves performance since the firewall parses fewer rules.
15. IDS:  For those of you who would like some basic scan detection, this will help.

Once you have all your rules in place, I highly recommend you update them with comments, and keep them updated.  Comments help you keep track which rules do what   By having a better understanding of the rules, there is less chance for misconfiguration.  For larger organizations with multiple firewall admins, I recommend the following information be put into comments whenever a rule is modified. This will help you track who changed which rules, and why.

• Name of person modifying rule
• Date/time of rule change
• Reason for rule change.

Once you have finished your firewall rulebase, it is critical that you test it.  We all make mistakes its the good admins who follow up and find them. To learn more about testing your firewall rulebase, check out Auditing Your Firewall Setup.

Conclusion

A firewall is only as good as it's implementation.  In today's dynamic world of Internet access, it is easy to make mistakes during the implementation process.  By building a solid and simple rulebase, you create a more secure firewall.
 

Author's bio
Lance Spitzner enjoys learning by blowing up his Unix systems at home. Before this, he was an Officer in the Rapid Deployment Force, where he blew up things of a different nature. You can reach him at lspitz@ksni.net .