Tom Eastep 2005 2006 2009 2013 Thomas M. Eastep Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License. The techniques described in this article were superceded in Shorewall 4.5.19 with the introduction of Shorewall Events. The feature described in this article require 'Recent Match' in your iptables and kernel. See the output of shorewall show capabilities to see if you have that match.

Port knocking is a technique whereby attempting to connect to port A enables access to port B from that same host. For the example on which this article is based, see http://www.soloport.com/iptables.html which should be considered to be part of this documentation.

In order to implement this solution, your iptables and kernel must support the 'recent match' extension (see FAQ 42). In this example: Attempting to connect to port 1600 enables SSH access. Access is enabled for 60 seconds. Attempting to connect to port 1601 disables SSH access (note that in the article linked above, attempting to connect to port 1599 also disables access. This is an port scan defence as explained in the article). To implement that approach: Add an action named SSHKnock (see the Action documentation). Leave the action.SSHKnock file empty. Create /etc/shorewall/SSHKnock with the following contents.use Shorewall::Chains; if ( $level ) { log_rule_limit( $level, $chainref, 'SSHKnock', 'ACCEPT', '', $tag, 'add', '-p tcp --dport 22 -m recent --rcheck --name SSH ' ); log_rule_limit( $level, $chainref, 'SSHKnock', 'DROP', '', $tag, 'add', '-p tcp ! --dport 22 ' ); } add_rule( $chainref, '-p tcp --dport 22 -m recent --rcheck --seconds 60 --name SSH -j ACCEPT' ); add_rule( $chainref, '-p tcp --dport 1599 -m recent --name SSH --remove -j DROP' ); add_rule( $chainref, '-p tcp --dport 1600 -m recent --name SSH --set -j DROP' ); add_rule( $chainref, '-p tcp --dport 1601 -m recent --name SSH --remove -j DROP' ); 1; Now if you want to protect SSH access to the firewall from the Internet, add this rule in /etc/shorewall/rules: #ACTION SOURCE DEST PROTO DEST PORT(S) SSHKnock net $FW tcp 22,1599,1600,1601 If you want to log the DROPs and ACCEPTs done by SSHKnock, you can just add a log level as in: #ACTION SOURCE DEST PROTO DEST PORT(S) SSHKnock:info net $FW tcp 22,1599,1600,1601 Assume that you forward port 22 from external IP address 206.124.146.178 to internal system 192.168.1.5. In /etc/shorewall/rules: #ACTION SOURCE DEST PROTO DEST PORT(S) SOURCE ORIGINAL # PORT(S) DEST DNAT- net loc:192.168.1.5 tcp 22 - 206.124.146.178 SSHKnock net $FW tcp 1599,1600,1601 SSHKnock net loc:192.168.1.5 tcp 22 - 206.124.146.178 You can use SSHKnock with DNAT on earlier releases provided that you omit the ORIGINAL DEST entry on the second SSHKnock rule. This rule will be quite secure provided that you specify 'routefilter' on your external interface and have NULL_ROUTE_RFC1918=Yes in shorewall.conf. For another way to implement Port Knocking, see the Manual Chain documentation.

This information has been moved to the Actions article.