Chapter 46. Using and configuring firewalld

The following is a brief overview in which scenario you should use one of the following utilities:

⁠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.

In certain situations, for example after manually editing firewalld configuration files, administrators want to verify that the changes are correct. You can use the firewall-cmd utility to verify the configuration.

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

To view the list of services using the graphical firewall-config tool, press the Super key to enter the Activities Overview, type firewall, and press Enter. The firewall-config tool appears. You can now view the list of services under the Services tab.

You can start the graphical firewall configuration tool using the command-line.

The Firewall Configuration window opens. Note that this command can be run as a normal user, but you are prompted for an administrator password occasionally.

With the CLI client, it is possible to get different views of the current firewall settings. The --list-all option shows a complete overview of the firewalld settings.

firewalld uses zones to manage the traffic. If a zone is not specified by the --zone option, the command is effective in the default zone assigned to the active network interface and connection.

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

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.

You can control the network traffic with predefined services using graphical user interface.

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.

To permit traffic through the firewall to a certain port, you can open the port in the GUI.

To permit traffic through the firewall using a certain protocol, you can use the GUI.

To permit traffic through the firewall from a certain port, you can use the GUI.

Through open ports, the system is accessible from the outside, which represents a security risk. Generally, keep ports closed and only open them if they are required for certain services.

When an open port is no longer needed, close that port in firewalld. It is highly recommended to close all unnecessary ports as soon as they are not used because leaving a port open represents a security risk.

You can list zones using the command line.

The Controlling traffic with predefined services using cli and 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.

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.

You can 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 protocol="udp" port="1025-65535"/>
  <port protocol="tcp" port="1025-65535"/>
</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 behavior is defined by setting the target of the zone. There are four options:

To route incoming traffic into a specific zone, 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 only HTTP traffic from the 192.0.2.0/24 network while any other traffic is blocked.

Policy objects allow the user to attach firewalld’s primitives’ such as services, ports, and rich rules to the policy. You can apply the policy objects to traffic that passes between zones in a stateful and unidirectional manner.

# firewall-cmd --permanent --new-policy myOutputPolicy

# firewall-cmd --permanent --policy myOutputPolicy --add-ingress-zone HOST

# firewall-cmd --permanent --policy myOutputPolicy --add-egress-zone ANY

HOST and ANY are the symbolic zones used in the ingress and egress zone lists.

Multiple policies can apply to the same set of traffic, therefore, priorities should be used to create an order of precedence for the policies that may be applied.

To set a priority to sort the policies:

# firewall-cmd --permanent --policy mypolicy --set-priority -500

In the above example -500 is a lower priority value but has higher precedence. Thus, -500 will execute before -100. Higher priority values have precedence over lower values.

The following rules apply to policy priorities:

The policy objects feature allows users to filter their container and virtual machine traffic.

You can specify --set-target options for policies. The following targets are available:

These are the different network address translation (NAT) types:

You can enable IP masquerading on your system. IP masquerading hides individual machines behind a gateway when accessing the Internet.

Now, all traffic, including ICMP requests, is dropped, except traffic which you have explicitly allowed.

To block and drop certain ICMP requests and allow others:

The block inversion inverts the setting of the ICMP requests blocks, so all requests, that were not previously blocked, are blocked because of the target of your zone changes to DROP. The requests that were blocked are not blocked. This means that if you want to unblock a request, you must use the blocking command.

To revert the block inversion to a fully permissive setting:

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 following is 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.

You can enable or disable the lockdown feature using the command line.

The lockdown allowlist can contain commands, security contexts, users and user IDs. If a command entry on the allowlist 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 allowlist configuration file contains the NetworkManager context and the default context of libvirt. The user ID 0 is also on the list.

+ The allowlist configuration files are stored in the /etc/firewalld/ directory.

<?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 allowlist 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 allowlist 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.

When intra-zone forwarding is enabled, the traffic within a single firewalld zone can flow from one interface or source to another interface or source. The zone specifies the trust level of interfaces and sources. If the trust level is the same, communication between interfaces or sources is possible.

Note that, if you enable intra-zone forwarding in the default zone of firewalld, it applies only to the interfaces and sources added to the current default zone.

The trusted zone of firewalld uses a default target set to ACCEPT. This zone accepts all forwarded traffic, and intra-zone forwarding is not applicable for it.

As for other default target values, forwarded traffic is dropped by default, which applies to all standard zones except the trusted zone.

You can use intra-zone forwarding to forward traffic between interfaces and sources within the same firewalld zone. For example, use this feature to forward traffic between an Ethernet network connected to enp1s0 and a Wi-Fi network connected to wlp0s20.

RHEL System Roles is a set of contents for the Ansible automation utility. This content together with the Ansible automation utility provides a consistent configuration interface to remotely manage multiple systems.

The rhel-system-roles.firewall role from the RHEL System Roles was introduced for automated configurations of the firewalld service. The rhel-system-roles package contains this System Role, and also the reference documentation.

To apply the firewalld parameters on one or more systems in an automated fashion, use the firewall System Role variable in a playbook. A playbook is a list of one or more plays that is written in the text-based YAML format.

You can use an inventory file to define a set of systems that you want Ansible to configure.

With the firewall role you can configure many different firewalld parameters, for example:

With the firewall RHEL system role, you can reset the firewalld settings to their default state. If you add the previous:replaced parameter to the variable list, the System Role removes all existing user-defined settings and resets firewalld to the defaults. If you combine the previous:replaced parameter with other settings, the firewall role removes all existing settings before applying new ones.

Perform this procedure on the Ansible control node.

With the firewall role you can remotely configure firewalld parameters with persisting effect on multiple managed hosts.

Perform this procedure on the Ansible control node.

You can use the RHEL firewall System Role to open or close ports in the local firewall for incoming traffic and make the new configuration persist across reboots. For example you can configure the default zone to permit incoming traffic for the HTTPS service.

Perform this procedure on the Ansible control node.

As a system administrator, you can use the firewall System Role to configure a dmz zone on the enp1s0 interface to permit HTTPS traffic to the zone. In this way, you enable external users to access your web servers.

Perform this procedure on the Ansible control node.