q

1. Enhancing OpenStack
FWaaS for real world
applications
Performance, Logging & Scheduling
Sarath Chandra Mekala
Chandan Dutta Chowdhury

2. Sarath Chandra Mekala
• Tech Lead @ Juniper Networks
• Works on Neutron Plugins
• Over a decade+ of experience with J2EE/NMS
• Contributed to Juniper’s FWaaS plugin
• Blogs @ sarathblogs.blogspot.in
• Likes Gadgets & Photography.

3. Chandan Dutta Chowdhury
• Tech Lead @ Juniper Networks
• Works on Neutron Plugins
• DevOPS & Opensource hacker
• Contributed to Juniper’s L2, L3 & NSX plugins
• Blogs @ chandanduttachowdhury.wordpress.com

4. Agenda
• Improve FWaaS Performance
• Scheduling Firewall Policies
• Logging Firewall Policies
Ideas to enable FWaaS cater to real world application needs

5. FWaaS Overview
Rule1
Rule2
Rule3
Router 1 Router 2 Router 3

6. FWaaS Performance

7. Reference Network Topology

8. Problem 1: Invalid Rules

9. Problem 2: Unnecessary Rule Deployment
Router 1 Router 2 Router 3
R1 R2 R3R1 R2 R3R1 R2 R3Firewall Policy
Firewall

10. Overview of FWaaS Performance Issues
• No rule validation
• Allows invalid rules to be present
• All rules are pushed onto all routers
• Unnecessary processing of rules on each router
• Affects performance
• Potential Security holes

11. Solution 1: Rule Validation

13. Solution 2: Rule Split & Distribution

14. Solution 2: Rule Split & Distribution
10 -> 20 30 -> 40
TCP-10-20-
allow
Firewall Policy
Firewall
TCP-30-40-
allow
Any-AnyAny-Any

15. Proposed Improvements
Validation (Invalid Rule Check)
• Rule’s Source IP and/or Destination IP do not belong to any of tenant
networks
(or)
• Rule’s Source/Destination IP belong to an existing tenant’s network
but the network is yet to be assigned to any router.
Performance
• All rules are segregated and grouped based on the networks they
belong to and allocated to their corresponding routers only.

16. Challenges
• Rule Ordering
• Deletion of router

17. Scheduling

18. Scheduling Rules
• Restrict access to:
• Web Sites
• Web Servers/FTP servers/SSH/RDP e.t.c
• Improves productivity
• Conserves Bandwidth
• Increases ROI

19. Scheduling – IPTables Spec
• IPTables on Ubuntu & CentOS supports rule scheduling
• Uses UTC for time zone by default
• iptables –A <chain> -m time --timestart 09:00 --
timestop 17:00 -weekdays Mon,Tue,Wed,Thu,Fri -j
<Action>
• -m time : match time
• --timestart : Start time
• --timestop : End time
• --weekdays : Days of the week

20. Scheduling – IPTables Spec
• Periodicity:
• datestart YYYY[-MM[-DD[Thh[:mm[:ss]]]]]
• datestop YYYY[-MM[-DD[Thh[:mm[:ss]]]]]
• timestart hh:mm[:ss]
• timestop hh:mm[:ss]
• monthdays day[,day...]
• weekdays day[,day...]
• contiguous
• Kerneltz

21. Scheduling – IPTables Examples
• To match on weekends, use:
-m time --weekdays SAT,SUN
• To match between a set of days with a specific time interval:
-m time --datestart 2015-08-23 T09:00 --datestop 2007-01-01T15:00
• To match on a time interval:
-m time --timestart 09:00 --timestop 17:00

22. Proposed Horizon Enhancement

23. Firewall Logs

24. Current Firewall implementation in OpenStack
• Doesn't provide packet logging
• Tenant does not have any knowledge of dropped packets
• While deploying new rules in the firewall, there is no way to
debug the rule
• No way to determine the effectiveness of the firewall rules

25. Benefits of Enabling Firewall Logs
• Monitoring
• Threat Alerting
• Threat correlation
• Report generation
• Troubleshooting packet drops
• Fine tuning Rules
• Detecting false positives
• Detecting false negatives

26. Firewall Logging for OpenStack
COMPUTE/NETW
ORK NODE
ROUTER
NAMESPACE
LOGGING RULE
LOG SERVER LOG ANALYSER
Firewall Agent
ENABLE
LOGGING
NEUTRON
FIREWALL
LOGS
LOGS
ALERTS!
REPORTS
OPENSTACK
TENANT
FIREWALL
RULES
FIREWALL RULES

27. Enable Firewall Logs with IPTables rules
iptables –A <chain> -m limit –limit <limit> -j LOG --log-prefix <prefix-string> -
-log-level <log-level>
-J LOG : processed by target LOG that logs packets with syslog
--log-prefix : a string to identify the log message
--log-level : log level to use with syslog message
iptables -A INPUT -j LOG --log-prefix "IPTABES LOG:" -m limit --limit 10/min --log-level 4

28. Example:

29. Proposed Horizon Enhancement for Firewall
Logging

30. Horizon UI Enhancement -2

31. Summary of logging feature
• Firewall Logs
• can help with debugging, threat analysis , Rule fine tuning
• Firewall Logging Can be integrated with FWaaS on OpenStack
• IPTables provides options to enable packet logging
• A centralized server can be introduced to collect and analyze firewall
logs
• Horizon UI extension can make logs accessible to the tenant

32. Q & A

33. Thank You