Firewall

Concept

We rely mainly on the separation of different VLANs. Firewalls provide exceptions to the rules. This results in a rather small firewall ruleset which is easy to understand.

The main decision about access control is expressed by the choice of the interface(s) application bind to. If an application opens a port on the fe interface, public access is assumed. If an application opens a port on the srv interface, restricted access is assumed.

Restrictions on the srv network

Only few connections from the public internet to ports on the srv network can be opened by default. Machines inside the same project may access the srv ports of their RG peers freely.

Currently we allow public access for:

  • SSH (22) - to provide login access to VMs

  • HTTP/S (80, 443) - to allow using HTTP-based verification of Let’s Encrypt certificates on the internal network and to present select services (IPv6 only) as needed

  • NTP (123) - to synchronize clocks with outside hosts

  • BGP (179, INPUT routers) to peer with uplink providers

  • Domain (53, INPUT on routers) to provide access to selected authoritative zones

  • RSYNC (873) - to allow binhosts to provide data to other locations

Managed components that are installed on a machine may provide additional firewall exceptions (either for public or data center-internal traffic), for example:

  • Grafana (statshost) opens ports 2003 and 2004.

  • VxLAN/OpenVPN servers open several ports depending on their configuration.

Adding custom firewall rules

How to add custom firewall rules depends on the platform of your VM: