Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Packet processing inside firewalls

During one packetpushers podcast, i was reminded of how useful it was for me when building or migrating firewalls knowing which step of the packet processing comes first.
As some vendors or technologies prefer doing thins differently than the others, migration of the configuration is not that straightforward.
This blog entry should summarize the information i've used in the past and keep as a reference for any future work.

Cisco

In ASDM on all ASA firewalls there is also a packet tracer, where the flow is illustrated for troubleshooting.

Juniper

PaloAlto

IPTables

The new NFTables should have the same concept (some chains might be called different differently) as IPTables, but I was unable to find anything specifically about it yet..

Checkpoint

Fortigate


There are other sources that describe similar behavior as mentioned above, or in case of Sonicwall a patent describing the process (that doesn't guarantee they also use it). But most of them look very similar, so it is easy to predict what new vendor or type of firewall would do when processing a packet.
With this in mind, firewall troubleshooting becomes a simple process of checking the stages in which packet can be.

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