DOKK / manpages / debian 11 / firehol-doc / firehol-protection.5.en
firehol-protection(5) 3.1.7 firehol-protection(5)

firehol-protection - add extra protections to a definition

protection [reverse] strong [requests/period [burst]]

protection [reverse] flood-protection-type [requests/period [burst]]

protection [reverse] { bad-packets | packet-protection-type }

protection [reverse] connlimit connections [mask prefix]

protection [reverse] connrate rate [burst amount] [srcmask prefix] [htable-size buckets] [htable-max entries] [htable-expire msec] [htable-gcinterval msec]

The protection subcommand sets protection rules on an interface or router.

Flood protections honour the values requests/period and burst. They are used to limit the rate of certain types of traffic.

The default rate FireHOL uses is 100 operations per second with a burst of 50. Run iptables -m limit --help for more information.

The protection type strong will switch on all protections (both packet and flood protections) except all-floods. It has aliases full and all.

The protection type bad-packets will switch on all packet protections but not flood protections.

You can specify multiple protection types by using multiple protection commands or by using a single command and enclosing the types in quotes.

Note

On a router, protections are normally set up on inface.

The reverse option will set up the protections on outface. You must use it as the first keyword.

Drops all the bad packets detected by these rules.
Drops all incoming invalid packets, as detected INVALID by the connection tracker.

See also FIREHOL_DROP_INVALID in firehol-defaults.conf(5) which allows setting this function globally.

Drops all packet fragments.

This rule will probably never match anything since iptables(8) reconstructs all packets automatically before the firewall rules are processed whenever connection tracking is running.

Drops all TCP packets that initiate a socket but have not got the SYN flag set.
Drops all TCP packets that have all TCP flags set.
Drops all TCP packets that have all TCP flags unset.
Drops all TCP packets that have illegal combinations of TCP flags set.

protection bad-packets
    

Allows only a certain amount of ICMP echo requests.
Allows only a certain amount of new TCP connections.

Be careful to not set the rate too low as the rule is applied to all connections regardless of their final result (rejected, dropped, established, etc).

Allows only a certain amount of new connections.

Be careful to not set the rate too low as the rule is applied to all connections regardless of their final result (rejected, dropped, established, etc).

protection all-floods 90/sec 40
    

These protections were added in v3.

These protections are used to limit the connections client make, per interface or router.

They support appending optional rule parameters to limit their scope to certain clients only.

Allow only a number of connections per client (implemented with connlimit with fixed type=saddr).
Allow up to a rate of new connections per client (implemented with hashlimit with fixed type=upto and mode=srcip).

Limit the number of concurrent connections to 10 per client

protection connlimit 10 mask 32
    

Limit the number of concurrent connections to 100 per client class-C and also limit it to 5 for 1.2.3.4

protection connlimit 100 mask 24
protection connlimit 5 src 1.2.3.4
    

In the last example above, if you want to give client 1.2.3.4 more connections than all others, you should exclude it from the first connlimit statement, like this:

protection connlimit 100 mask 24 src not 1.2.3.4
protection connlimit 200 src 1.2.3.4
    

Limit all clients to 10 concurrect connections and 60 connections/minute

protection connlimit 10
protection connrate 60/minute
    

When using multiple types in a single command, if the quotes are forgotten, incorrect rules will be generated without warning.

When using multiple types in a single command, FireHOL will silently ignore any types that come after a group type (bad-packets, strong and its aliases). Only use group types on their own line.

firehol(1) - FireHOL program
firehol.conf(5) - FireHOL configuration
firehol-interface(5) - interface definition
firehol-router(5) - router definition
FireHOL Website (http://firehol.org/)
FireHOL Online PDF Manual (http://firehol.org/firehol-manual.pdf)
FireHOL Online Documentation (http://firehol.org/documentation/)

FireHOL Team.

Built 28 Feb 2021 FireHOL Reference