FirewallD

FirewallD is a firewall management tool for Linux operating systems. It provides firewall features by acting as a front-end for the iptables packet filtering system provided by the Linux kernel.^[2] The name firewalld adheres to the Unix convention of naming system daemons by appending the letter “d”.^[3]

FirewallD is written in Python. It was intended to be ported to C++, but the porting project was abandoned in January 2015.^[4]

Features

FirewallD supports both IPv4 and IPv6 networks and can administer separate firewall zones with varying degrees of trust as defined in zone profiles. Network Manager can be configured to automatically switch zone profile based on known Wi-Fi (wireless) and Ethernet (wired) networks, but FirewallD cannot do this on its own.^[5]

Services and applications can use the D-Bus interface to query and configure the firewall.^[6] FirewallD supports timed rules, meaning the number of connections (or “hits”) to a service can be limited globally. There is no support for hit-counting and subsequent connection rejection per source IP; a common technique deployed to limit the impact of brute-force hacking and distributed denial of service attacks.^[7]

FirewallD’s command syntax is similar but more verbose than other iptables front-ends like Ubuntu’s Uncomplicated Firewall (ufw).^[7] The command line interface allows managing firewall rulesets for protocol, ports, source and destination; or predefined services by name.

Services are defined as XML files containing port and protocol mappings, and optionally extra information like specifying subnets and listing required Kernel helper modules.^[8] The syntax is similar to systemd’s service files. The below shows a simple service file for a web server listening on TCP port 443:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<service>
  <short>Web Server</short>
  <description>Public web host over HTTPS.</description>
  <port port="443" protocol="tcp" />
</service>

Graphical front-ends (GUIs)

firewall-config is a graphical front-end that is optionally included with FirewallD. It revolves around providing a glancing overview and convenient on/off toggle switches for pre-configured zones and services. There is, however, no way to add new zones or services from firewall-cmd itself.

firewall-applet is a small status indicator utility that is optionally included with FirewallD. It can provide firewall event log notifications as well as a quick way to open firewall-config. firewall-applet was ported from the GTK+ to the Qt framework in the summer of 2015 following the GNOME Desktop’s deprecation of system tray icons.^[9]

Adoption

FirewallD ships by default on the following Linux distributions:^[6]

• CentOS 7 and newer
• Fedora 18 and newer
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and newer

FirewallD is enabled by default in all the distributions that rely on it as their default firewall. FirewallD is also available as one of many firewall options in the package repository of many other popular distributions such as Debian.^[10]

References