firewalld is a firewall service daemon that provides a dynamic customizable host-based firewall with a D-Bus interface. Being dynamic, it enables creating, changing, and deleting the rules without the necessity to restart the firewall daemon each time the rules are changed.

firewalld uses the concepts of zones and services, that simplify the traffic management. Zones are predefined sets of rules. Network interfaces and sources can be assigned to a zone. The traffic allowed depends on the network your computer is connected to and the security level this network is assigned. Firewall services are predefined rules that cover all necessary settings to allow incoming traffic for a specific service and they apply within a zone.

Services use one or more ports or addresses for network communication. Firewalls filter communication based on ports. To allow network traffic for a service, its ports must be open. firewalld blocks all traffic on ports that are not explicitly set as open. Some zones, such as trusted, allow all traffic by default.

⁠firewalld can be used to separate networks into different zones according to the level of trust that the user has decided to place on the interfaces and traffic within that network. A connection can only be part of one zone, but a zone can be used for many network connections.

NetworkManager notifies firewalld of the zone of an interface. You can assign zones to interfaces with:

The latter three can only edit the appropriate NetworkManager configuration files. If you change the zone of the interface using the web console, firewall-cmd or firewall-config, the request is forwarded to NetworkManager and is not handled by ⁠firewalld.

The predefined zones are stored in the /usr/lib/firewalld/zones/ directory and can be instantly applied to any available network interface. These files are copied to the /etc/firewalld/zones/ directory only after they are modified. The default settings of the predefined zones are as follows:

One of these zones is set as the default zone. When interface connections are added to NetworkManager, they are assigned to the default zone. On installation, the default zone in firewalld is set to be the public zone. The default zone can be changed.

A service can be a list of local ports, protocols, source ports, and destinations, as well as a list of firewall helper modules automatically loaded if a service is enabled. Using services saves users time because they can achieve several tasks, such as opening ports, defining protocols, enabling packet forwarding and more, in a single step, rather than setting up everything one after another.

Service configuration options and generic file information are described in the firewalld.service(5) man page. The services are specified by means of individual XML configuration files, which are named in the following format: service-name.xml. Protocol names are preferred over service or application names in firewalld.

Services can be added and removed using the graphical firewall-config tool, firewall-cmd, and firewall-offline-cmd.

Alternatively, you can edit the XML files in the /etc/firewalld/services/ directory. If a service is not added or changed by the user, then no corresponding XML file is found in /etc/firewalld/services/. The files in the /usr/lib/firewalld/services/ directory can be used as templates if you want to add or change a service.

The firewall service, firewalld, is installed on the system by default. Use the firewalld CLI interface to check that the service is running.

In an emergency situation, such as a system attack, it is possible to disable all network traffic and cut off the attacker.

Switching off panic mode reverts the firewall to its permanent settings. To switch panic mode off:

# firewall-cmd --panic-off

To see whether panic mode is switched on or off, use:

# firewall-cmd --query-panic

The most straightforward method to control traffic is to add a predefined service to firewalld. This opens all necessary ports and modifies other settings according to the service definition file.

To enable or disable a predefined or custom service:

To edit a service:

The Ports, Protocols, and Source Port tabs enable adding, changing, and removing of ports, protocols, and source port for the selected service. The modules tab is for configuring Netfilter helper modules. The Destination tab enables limiting traffic to a particular destination address and Internet Protocol (IPv4 or IPv6).

Services can be added and removed using the graphical firewall-config tool, firewall-cmd, and firewall-offline-cmd. Alternatively, you can edit the XML files in /etc/firewalld/services/. If a service is not added or changed by the user, then no corresponding XML file are found in /etc/firewalld/services/. The files /usr/lib/firewalld/services/ can be used as templates if you want to add or change a service.

firewalld loads files from /usr/lib/firewalld/services in the first place. If files are placed in /etc/firewalld/services and they are valid, then these will override the matching files from /usr/lib/firewalld/services. The overridden files in /usr/lib/firewalld/services are used as soon as the matching files in /etc/firewalld/services have been removed or if firewalld has been asked to load the defaults of the services. This applies to the permanent environment only. A reload is needed to get these fallbacks also in the runtime environment.

Ports are logical devices that enable an operating system to receive and distinguish network traffic and forward it accordingly to system services. These are usually represented by a daemon that listens on the port, that is it waits for any traffic coming to this port.

Normally, system services listen on standard ports that are reserved for them. The httpd daemon, for example, listens on port 80. However, system administrators by default configure daemons to listen on different ports to enhance security or for other reasons.

To permit traffic through the firewall to a certain port:

To permit traffic through the firewall using a certain protocol:

To permit traffic through the firewall from a certain port:

The Section 44.9.2, “Controlling traffic with predefined services using CLI” and Section 44.9.5, “Controlling ports using CLI” explain how to add services or modify ports in the scope of the current working zone. Sometimes, it is required to set up rules in a different zone.

# firewall-cmd --add-service=ssh --zone=public

System administrators assign a zone to a networking interface in its configuration files. If an interface is not assigned to a specific zone, it is assigned to the default zone. After each restart of the firewalld service, firewalld loads the settings for the default zone and makes it active.

It is possible to define different sets of rules for different zones and then change the settings quickly by changing the zone for the interface that is being used. With multiple interfaces, a specific zone can be set for each of them to distinguish traffic that is coming through them.

This procedure describes how to add a firewalld zone to a NetworkManager connection using the nmcli utility.

When the connection is managed by NetworkManager, it must be aware of a zone that it uses. For every network connection, a zone can be specified, which provides the flexibility of various firewall settings according to the location of the computer with portable devices. Thus, zones and settings can be specified for different locations, such as company or home.

To use custom zones, create a new zone and use it just like a predefined zone. New zones require the --permanent option, otherwise the command does not work.

Zones can also be created using a zone configuration file. This approach can be helpful when you need to create a new zone, but want to reuse the settings from a different zone and only alter them a little.

A firewalld zone configuration file contains the information for a zone. These are the zone description, services, ports, protocols, icmp-blocks, masquerade, forward-ports and rich language rules in an XML file format. The file name has to be zone-name.xml where the length of zone-name is currently limited to 17 chars. The zone configuration files are located in the /usr/lib/firewalld/zones/ and /etc/firewalld/zones/ directories.

The following example shows a configuration that allows one service (SSH) and one port range, for both the TCP and UDP protocols:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<zone>
  <short>My zone</short>
  <description>Here you can describe the characteristic features of the zone.</description>
  <service name="ssh"/>
  <port port="1025-65535" protocol="tcp"/>
  <port port="1025-65535" protocol="udp"/>
</zone>

To change settings for that zone, add or remove sections to add ports, forward ports, services, and so on.

For every zone, you can set a default behavior that handles incoming traffic that is not further specified. Such behaviour is defined by setting the target of the zone. There are four options - default, ACCEPT, REJECT, and DROP. By setting the target to ACCEPT, you accept all incoming packets except those disabled by a specific rule. If you set the target to REJECT or DROP, you disable all incoming packets except those that you have allowed in specific rules. When packets are rejected, the source machine is informed about the rejection, while there is no information sent when the packets are dropped.

You can use zones to manage incoming traffic based on its source. That enables you to sort incoming traffic and route it through different zones to allow or disallow services that can be reached by that traffic.

If you add a source to a zone, the zone becomes active and any incoming traffic from that source will be directed through it. You can specify different settings for each zone, which is applied to the traffic from the given sources accordingly. You can use more zones even if you only have one network interface.

To route incoming traffic into a specific source, add the source to that zone. The source can be an IP address or an IP mask in the Classless Inter-domain Routing (CIDR) notation.

The following procedure allows all incoming traffic from 192.168.2.15 in the trusted zone:

Removing a source from the zone cuts off the traffic coming from it.

To enable sorting the traffic based on a port of origin, specify a source port using the --add-source-port option. You can also combine this with the --add-source option to limit the traffic to a certain IP address or IP range.

By removing a source port you disable sorting the traffic based on a port of origin.

To allow traffic from a specific network to use a service on a machine, use zones and source. The following procedure allows traffic from 192.168.1.0/24 to be able to reach the HTTP service while any other traffic is blocked.

You can allow incoming traffic to be accepted by a zone based on a protocol. All traffic using the specified protocol is accepted by a zone, in which you can apply further rules and filtering.

Using firewalld, you can set up ports redirection so that any incoming traffic that reaches a certain port on your system is delivered to another internal port of your choice or to an external port on another machine.

# firewall-cmd --add-forward-port=port=port-number:proto=tcp|udp|sctp|dccp:toport=port-number

To redirect a port to another port at a different IP address:

Follow the steps to redirect the TCP port 80 to port 88.

To remove a redirected port:

# firewall-cmd --remove-forward-port=port=port-number:proto=<tcp|udp>:toport=port-number:toaddr=<IP>

To remove a forwarded port redirected to a different address, use the following procedure.

To remove the port redirection:

IP sets can be used in firewalld zones as sources and also as sources in rich rules. In Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the preferred method is to use the IP sets created with firewalld in a direct rule.

Only the creation and removal of IP sets is limited to the permanent environment, all other IP set options can be used also in the runtime environment without the --permanent option.

You can set the priority parameter in a rich rule to any number between -32768 and 32767, and lower values have higher precedence.

The firewalld service organizes rules based on their priority value into different chains:

Inside these sub-chains, firewalld sorts the rules based on their priority value.

The procedure describes an example of how to create a rich rule that uses the priority parameter to log all traffic that is not allowed or denied by other rules. You can use this rule to flag unexpected traffic.

The lockdown allow list can contain commands, security contexts, users and user IDs. If a command entry on the allow list ends with an asterisk "*", then all command lines starting with that command will match. If the "*" is not there then the absolute command including arguments must match.

The default allow list configuration file contains the NetworkManager context and the default context of libvirt. The user ID 0 is also on the list.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
	<whitelist>
	  <selinux context="system_u:system_r:NetworkManager_t:s0"/>
	  <selinux context="system_u:system_r:virtd_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023"/>
	  <user id="0"/>
	</whitelist>

Following is an example allow list configuration file enabling all commands for the firewall-cmd utility, for a user called user whose user ID is 815:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
	<whitelist>
	  <command name="/usr/libexec/platform-python -s /bin/firewall-cmd*"/>
	  <selinux context="system_u:system_r:NetworkManager_t:s0"/>
	  <user id="815"/>
	  <user name="user"/>
	</whitelist>

This example shows both user id and user name, but only one option is required. Python is the interpreter and is prepended to the command line. You can also use a specific command, for example:

/usr/bin/python3 /bin/firewall-cmd --lockdown-on

In that example, only the --lockdown-on command is allowed.

In Red Hat Enterprise Linux, all utilities are placed in the /usr/bin/ directory and the /bin/ directory is sym-linked to the /usr/bin/ directory. In other words, although the path for firewall-cmd when entered as root might resolve to /bin/firewall-cmd, /usr/bin/firewall-cmd can now be used. All new scripts should use the new location. But be aware that if scripts that run as root are written to use the /bin/firewall-cmd path, then that command path must be added in the allow listed in addition to the /usr/bin/firewall-cmd path traditionally used only for non-root users.

The * at the end of the name attribute of a command means that all commands that start with this string match. If the * is not there then the absolute command including arguments must match.