As requested, here a couple of paragraphs about the recently added statematch attribute and some advanced (and tricky) traffic filtering topics. Signed-off-by: Stefan Berger <stefanb(a)us.ibm.com&gt; --- docs/formatnwfilter.html.in | 117 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 117 insertions(+) Index: libvirt-acl/docs/formatnwfilter.html.in =================================================================== --- libvirt-acl.orig/docs/formatnwfilter.html.in +++ libvirt-acl/docs/formatnwfilter.html.in @@ -277,6 +277,13 @@ Valid values are in the range of 0 to 1000. If this attribute is not provided, the value 500 will automatically be assigned. </li> + <li> + statematch -- optional; possible values are '0' or 'false' to + turn the underlying connection state matching off; default is 'true' + <br> + Also read the section on <a href="#nwfelemsRulesAdv">advanced configuration</a> + topics. + </li> </ul> <p> The above example indicates that the traffic of type <code>ip</code> @@ -1117,6 +1124,116 @@ <br><br> </p> + <h3><a name="nwfelemsRulesAdv">Advanced Filter Configuration Topics</a></h3> + <p> + The following sections discuss advanced filter configuration + topics. + </p> + <h4><a name="nwfelemsRulesAdvTracking">Connection tracking</a></h4> + <p> + The network filtering subsystem (on Linux) makes use of the connection + tracking support of iptables. This helps in enforcing the + directionality of network traffic (state match) as well as + counting and limiting the number of simultaneous connections towards + a VM. As an example, if a VM has TCP port 8080 + open, clients may connect to it on port 8080. The tracking of the + connection then prevents the client from initiating a connection from + (TCP client) port 8080 to the host back (after previously having + gained access to the VM). More importantly, tracking helps to prevent + remote attackers to establish a connection back to a VM for example + if the user inside the VM has established a connection to + port 80 on an attacker site, then the attacker won't be able to + initiate a connection from TCP port 80 towards the VM. + By default the connection state match that enables the enforcement + of directionality of traffic is turned on. <br> + The following shows an example XML fragement where this feature has been + turned off for incoming connections to TCP port 12345. + </p> +<pre> + [...] + &lt;rule direction='in' action='accept' statematch='false'&gt; + &lt;tcp dstportstart='12345'/&gt; + &lt;/rule&gt; + [...] +</pre> + <p> + This now allows incoming traffic to TCP port 12345, but would also + enable the initiation from (client) TCP port 12345 within the VM, + which may or may not be desirable. + </p> + + <h4><a name="nwfelemsRulesAdvLimiting">Limiting Number of Connections</a></h4> + <p> + To limit the number of connections a VM may establish, a rule must + be provided that sets a limit of connections for a given + type of traffic. If for example a VM + is supposed to be allowed to only ping one other IP address at a time + and is supposed to have only one active incoming ssh connection at a + time, the following XML fragment can be used to achieve this. + </p> +<pre> + [...] + &lt;rule action='drop' direction='in' priority='400'&gt; + &lt;tcp connlimit-above='1'/&gt; + &lt;/rule&gt; + &lt;rule action='accept' direction='in' priority='500'&gt; + &lt;tcp dstportstart='22'/&gt; + &lt;/rule&gt; + &lt;rule action='drop' direction='out' priority='400'&gt; + &lt;icmp connlimit-above='1'/&gt; + &lt;/rule&gt; + &lt;rule action='accept' direction='out' priority='500'&gt; + &lt;icmp/&gt; + &lt;/rule&gt; + &lt;rule action='accept' direction='out' priority='500'&gt; + &lt;udp dstportstart='53'/&gt; + &lt;/rule&gt; + &lt;rule action='drop' direction='inout' priority='1000'&gt; + &lt;all/&gt; + &lt;/rule&gt; + [...] +</pre> + <p> + Note that the rule for the limit has to logically appear + before the rule for accepting the traffic.<br> + An additional rule for letting DNS traffic to port 22 + go out the VM has been added to avoid ssh sessions not + getting established for reasons related to DNS lookup failures + by the ssh daemon. Leaving this rule out may otherwise lead to + fun-filled debugging joy. + <br><br> + Lot of care must be taken with timeouts related + to tracking of traffic. An ICMP ping that + the user may have terminated inside the VM may have a long + timeout in the host's connection tracking system and therefore + not allow another ICMP ping to go through for a while. Therefore, + the timeouts have to be tuned in the host's sysfs, i.e., + </p> + +<pre> + echo 3 > /proc/sys/net/netfilter/nf_conntrack_icmp_timeout +</pre> + <p> + sets the ICMP connection tracking timeout to 3 seconds. The + effect of this is that once one ping is terminated, another + one can start after 3 seconds.<br> + Further, we want to point out that a client that for whatever + reason has not properly closed a TCP connection may cause a + connection to be held open for a longer period of time, + depending to what timeout the <code>TCP established</code> state + timeout has been set to on the host. Also, idle connections may time + out in the connection tracking system but can be reactivated once + packets are exchanged. However, a newly initated connection may force + an idle connection into TCP backoff if the number of allowed connections + is set to a too low limit, the new connection is established + and hits (not exceeds) the limit of allowed connections and for + example a key is pressed on the old ssh session, which now has become + unresponsive due to traffic being dropped. + Therefore, the limit of connections should be rather high so that + fluctuations in new TCP connections don't cause odd + traffic behavior in relaton to idle connections. + </p> + <h2><a name="nwfcli">Command line tools</a></h2> <p> The libvirt command line tool <code>virsh</code> has been extended