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LATEST NEWS AND TESTIMONIALS

Aug 13, 2018 - FireHOL v3.1.6 released [more ...]

Apr 27, 2014 - I just wanted to thank you for ... [more ...]


WHAT ARE FIREHOL AND FIREQOS?

FireHOL is a language (and a program to run it) which builds secure, stateful
firewalls from easy to understand, human-readable configurations. The
configurations stay readable even for very complex setups.

FireQOS is a program which sets up traffic shaping from an easy-to-understand
and flexible configuration file.

Both programs abstract away the differences between IPv4 and IPv6. so you can
concentrate on the rules you want. You can apply rules for IPv4 or IPv6, or
both, as you need.

We think the best advert for these programs are their configurations. See below
for:

 * a FireHOL example and more information
 * a FireQOS example and more information

The two programs are shipped together but work independently so you can choose
to use one or both.


PHILOSOPHY

 * Make firewalling and traffic shaping an easy, straightforward task for
   everyone from end users to experienced administrators.
 * Be as secure as possible by allowing explicitly only the wanted traffic to
   flow.
 * Be a resource of knowledge around services and their peculiarities.
 * Be flexible enough for any firewalling or traffic-shaping need.
 * Be simple to install on any modern Linux system


USES FOR FIREHOL AND FIREQOS

Almost every Linux firewall / traffic control need is covered, including:

 * control of any number of internal/external/virtual interfaces
 * control of any combination of routed traffic
 * setting up DMZ routers and servers
 * all kinds of NAT
 * providing strong protection (flooding, spoofing, etc.)
 * transparent caches
 * source MAC verification
 * blacklists, whitelists
 * classification of traffic by source, destination and type
 * provide bandwidth guarantees and upper limits
 * allow optional borrowing of unused bandwidth
 * live stats on traffic classification


FIREHOL

FireHOL is an iptables firewall generator producing stateful iptables packet
filtering firewalls, on Linux hosts and routers with any number of network
interfaces, any number of routes, any number of services served, any number of
complexity between variations of the services (including positive and negative
expressions).

Writing a complete, safe, firewall, suitable for protecting a host and a network
can be this easy:

interface eth0 mylan
    policy accept

interface ppp+ internet
    server smtp accept
    server http accept
    server ftp  accept
    server ssh  accept src example.firehol.org

    client all  accept

router mylan2internet inface eth0 outface ppp+
    masquerade
    route all accept

Jump straight to the documentation to learn how to configure your own.

Hopefully you have noticed that all the rules given match just one direction of
the traffic: the request. They don't say anything about replies. This is because
FireHOL handles the replies automatically. You don't have to do anything about
them: if a request is allowed, then the corresponding reply is also allowed.
This also means that FireHOL produces the iptables statements to exactly match
what is allowed in both directions and nothing more.

FireHOL is a language to express firewalling rules, not just a script that
produces some kind of a firewall.


IS IT SECURE?

FireHOL is secure because it has been designed with the right firewalling
concept: deny everything, then allow only what is needed.

Also, FireHOL produces stateful iptables packet filtering firewalls (and
possibly, the only generic tool today that does that for all services in both
directions of the firewall).

Stateful means that traffic allowed to pass is part of a valid connection that
has been initiated the right way. Stateful also means that you can have control
based on who initiated the traffic. For example: you can choose to be able to
ping anyone on the internet, but no one to be able to ping you. If for example
you don't need to run a server on your Linux host, you can easily achieve a
situation where you are able to do anything to anyone, but as far as the rest of
world is concerned, you do not exist!


LEARN ANOTHER LANGUAGE?

FireHOL has been designed to allow you configure your firewall the same way you
think of it. Its language is extremely simple. Basically you have to learn four
commands:

 * interface, to setup a firewall on a network interface
 * router, to setup a firewall on traffic routed from one network interface to
   another
 * server, to setup a listening service within an interface or router. The same
   command can be used as route within routers
 * client, to setup a service client within an interface or router

Commands client and server have exactly the same syntax. A FireHOL interface has
two mandatory arguments and a router has only one (and this is the same as one
of the two that interface requires). All of the optional parameters are the same
to all of them. This sounds like just one command is to be learned...

Of course there are a few more commands defined, but all of them exist just to
give you finer control on these four.

If you don't believe it is simple, consider this example.


WHY?

As an IT executive, responsible for many dozens of Linux systems, I needed a
firewalling solution that would allow me and my team to have a clear and simple
view of what is happening on each server, as far as firewalling is concerned. I
also needed a solution that will allow my team members to produce high quality
and homogeneous firewalls independently of their security skills and knowledge.
After searching for such a tool, I quickly concluded that no tool is flexible,
open, easy, and simple enough for what I needed.

I decided to write FireHOL in a way that will allow me, or anyone else, to view,
verify and audit the firewall of any Linux server or Linux router in seconds.
FireHOL's configuration is extremely simple... you don't have to be an expert to
design a complicated but secure firewall.


WHAT FEATURES DOES IT HAVE?

FireHOL handles firewalls protecting one host on all its interfaces and any
combination of stateful firewalls routing traffic from one interface to another.
There are no limitations on the number of interfaces or on the number of routing
routes (except the ones iptables has, if any).

FireHOL, still lacks a few features: QoS for example is not supported directly.
You are welcome to extend FireHOL and send me your patches to integrate within
FireHOL. In any case however, you can embed normal iptables commands in a
FireHOL configuration to do whatever iptables supports.

Since FireHOL produces stateful commands, for every supported service it needs
to know the flow of requests and replies. Today FireHOL supports the following
services:

 * Many single socket protocols, such as HTTP, NNTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP4, RADIUS,
   SSH, LDAP, MySQL, Telnet, NTP, DNS, etc. There are a few dozens of such
   services defined in FireHOL. Check this list. Even if something is missing,
   you can define it.
 * Many complex protocols, such as FTP, NFS, SAMBA, PPTP, etc. If you need some
   complex protocol that is not present, you will have to program it (in simple
   Bash scripting - there are many commented examples on how this is done).
   Again, you will just create one Bash function with the rules of the protocol,
   and FireHOL will turn it to a client, a server or a router.


FIREQOS

FireQOS is a traffic shaping helper. It has a very simple shell scripting
language to express traffic shaping. You run FireQOS to setup the kernel
commands. You can also run it to get status information or dump the traffic of a
class. FireQOS is not a daemon and does not need to run always to apply traffic
shaping.

Configuring a complete, functional, traffic shaping setup can be this easy:

DEVICE=dsl0
INPUT_SPEED=11000kbit
OUTPUT_SPEED=800kbit
LINKTYPE="adsl local pppoe-llc"

server_rtp_ports="udp/10000:10100"
server_mytorrents_ports="any/60000:64999"

interface ${DEVICE} world bidirectional ${LINKTYPE} input rate ${INPUT_SPEED} output rate ${OUTPUT_SPEED}
    class voip commit 110kbit pfifo
        server sip,rtp
        client sip,stun

    class interactive input commit 20% output commit 30%
        server dns,ssh,hangouts,icmp
        client dns,ssh,hangouts,gtalk,jabber,teamviewer,facetime

    class vpns input commit 20% output commit 30%
        server pptp,GRE

    class synacks commit 5%
        match tcp syn
        match tcp ack

    class surfing commit 5%
        client surfing,rsync

    class default

    class background commit 5%
        client torrents
        server mytorrents prio 1

Jump straight to the documentation to learn how to configure your own.

FireQOS also allows you to monitor the live status of traffic:

# ./sbin/fireqos.in status adsl-in
FireQOS v1.0 DEVELOPMENT
(C) 2013 Costa Tsaousis, GPL


adsl-in: eth0 input => ifb0, type: adsl, overhead: 26
Rate: 10500Kbit/s, min: 105Kbit/s, R2Q: 8 (min rate 105Kbit/s)
Values in Kbit/s

  CLASS    voip realtim clients torrent default
PRIORIT       1       2       3       5       4
 COMMIT     105    1050    1050     105     105
    MAX   10500   10500   10500    9450    9450


   adsl-in (eth0 input => ifb0) - values in Kbit/s
  TOTAL    voip realtim clients torrent default
     46       -       7       -      39       -
     50       -       5       -      42       3
     80       -       9       -      60      11
     75       -       6       -      65       4
    103      19       3       -      79       2
     56       -       3       -      50       3
     84       -       5       -      70       9

 * FireQOS applies traffic shaping on the output of any interface.
 * FireQOS applies traffic shaping on the input of any interface. Shaping
   incoming traffic is classful, i.e. you have all the control available,
   similar to outgoing traffic. This is accomplished by setting up IFB devices.
   FireQOS handles everything about IFB devices. Any kernel that supports them
   will do.
 * FireQOS supports overheads calculation. This means it can perfectly shape
   incoming and outgoing traffic on a Linux box behind an ADSL router, or on a
   Linux box with an ADSL modem attached. ATM overheads will be calculated based
   on the DSL encapsulation.
 * FireQOS supports both IPv4 and IPv6. Each interface can be defined as ipv4,
   ipv6 or both (ipv4 and ipv6 in parallel).
 * FireQOS supports nested classes. Nested classes can either be direct (child
   classes are directly attached to their parent class), or hardware emulation
   (child classes are attached to a qdisc with linklayer parameters and
   overheads calculation, which is attached to a parent class).
 * FireQOS calculates port range masks (you just give a port range, FireQOS
   finds the optimal combination of tc statements to accomplish the match).
 * Virtually any number of interfaces, any number of classes and any number of
   classification rules can be configured (the way it is organised it can
   configure up to 5000 classes per interface).
 * It classifies packets using tc (both ipv4 and ipv6), but you can also use
   iptables CLASSIFY targets, or MARKs.
 * HTB is used for all classes.
 * FireQOS allows you to tcpdump the traffic of any leaf class. This allows you
   to examine the traffic you have assigned to classes.

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