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Preventing of SYN Flood Attack with Iptables Firewall

Conference Paper · March 2010

DOI: 10.1109/ICCSN.2010.74 · Source: IEEE Xplore

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 2010 Second International Conference on Communication Software and Networks

Preventing of SYN Flood attack with iptables Firewall

Sara Mirzaie
Under graduated MS student of information technology
Yazd University
Yazd, Iran
saramirzaie@stu.yazduni.ac.ir

Alireza Karimi Elyato DR.Mehdi Agha Sarram

Under graduated MS student of information technology Assistant Professor
Yazd university Yazd University
Yazd, Iran Yazd, Iran
a_karimi@stu.yazduni.ac.ir Mehdi.sarram@yazduni.ac.ir

Abstract— Denial of services attacks prevents legitimate users

from using a service. One particular type of this attack is II. TYPE STYLE AND FONTS
known as SYN flood, where external hosts attempt to A Denial of Service (DOS) attack is an attack which
overwhelm the server machine by sending a constant stream of attempts to prevent the victim from being able to use all or
TCP connection request. There are several approaches for part of their network connection.
dealing with this attack that firewall is one of them. In this
A denial of service attack may target a user, to prevent
paper we attempt to prevent of this attack with iptables
them from making outgoing connections on the network. Or
firewalls.
may also target an entire organization, to either prevent
Keywords-firewall; table; chain; rule; iptables outgoing traffic or to prevent incoming traffic to certain
network services, such as the organizations web page.
Denial of service attacks are much easier to accomplish
I. INTRODUCTION than remotely gaining administrative access to a target
Attacks are the techniques that attacker uses to exploit system. Because of this, denials of service attacks have
the vulnerabilities in applications. Denial of service attack is become very common on the Internet.
attempted to make computer resource unavailable to its DOS attack has different types that the earliest form of
intended user. SYN flood attack is the way that a malicious them is the flood attack. The attacker simply sends more
host can attempt to deny services provided by a server traffic than the victim could handle. This requires the
machine by sending a large number of TCP open request. attacker to have a faster network connection than the victim.
There are several approaches for preventing of DOS attack This is the lowest-tech of the denial of service attacks, and
that firewalls is one of them. also the most difficult to completely prevent. One of The
Iptables firewall is a Linux-oriented firewall that used in most famous forms of flood attack is SYN flood attack.
this paper. Iptables is a software and statefull firewall that When a session is initiated between the Transport
monitor on header of packets and filters packet Control Program (TCP) client and server in a network, a very
The rest of this paper is structured as follows: small buffer space exists to handle the usually rapid "hand-
At the beginning of this paper, we describe the some of shaking" exchange of messages that sets up the session. The
the computer’s attacks known as Denial of Service attacks session-establishing packets include a SYN field that
(DOS) and explain one of them in the name of SYN flood identifies the sequence in the message exchange. An attacker
attack. Next section details involved firewall definition, its can send a number of connection requests very rapidly and
types and iptables firewall. In section IV we familiar with then fail to respond to the reply. This leaves the first packet
this firewall structure and describe firewall Rules in the buffer so that other, legitimate connection requests
components and learn how we can build its rules. in section can't be accommodated. Although the packet in the buffer is
V we talk about state of packet and in Last section of this dropped after a certain period of time without a reply, the
paper describe that how to prevent of SYN flood attack with effect of many of these bogus connection requests is to make
iptables firewall and show the rules that used for this goal. it difficult for legitimate requests for a session to get
established. In general, this problem depends on the
operating system providing correct settings or allowing the

978-0-7695-3961-4/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE 532

DOI 10.1109/ICCSN.2010.74
network administrator to tune the size of the buffer and the
timeout period [1].
Various defending mechanism exist for preventing of this
attack that can among them point to firewalls
III. FIREWALLS
Firewall in computer dictionary means preventing of
internal network against malicious networks. A firewall is a
part of a computer system or network that is designed to
block unauthorized access while permitting authorized
communications. It is a device or set of devices configured to
permit, deny, encrypt, decrypt, or proxy all (in and out)
computer traffic between different security domains based Figure 1 Iptables structure
upon a set of rules and other criteria [1].
Firewalls can be implemented in either hardware or A. Rule
software, or a combination of both. Firewalls are frequently Consist of conditions for choosing packet and determine
used to prevent unauthorized Internet users from accessing what things shall be done with this packet.
private networks connected to the Internet, especially
intranet. All messages entering or leaving the intranet pass B. Chain
through the firewall, which examines each message and Iptables rules are grouped into chains. A chain is a set of
blocks those that do not meet the specified security criteria. rules used to determine what to do with a packet. Three
Firewalls make it possible to filter incoming and outgoing default chains is input, output and forward.
traffic that flows through your system. A firewall can use
C. Table
one or more sets of “rules” to inspect the network packets as
they come in or go out of your network connections and Chains are grouped into tables. Iptables has three built-in
either allows the traffic through or blocks it. Firewalls tables in the name of filter, NAT, mangle, each with a default
mainly divided in tow categories: policy that in the following each of them shortly explain.
Stateless firewalls: Stateless firewalls watch network traffic, 1) Filter
and restrict or block packets based on source and destination The filter table is the default table for any rule. The filter
addresses or other static values. They are not 'aware' of table is used to allow and block traffic and has three
traffic patterns or data flows. A stateless firewall uses simple commonly used built-in chains [3].
rule-sets that do not account for the possibility that a packet • INPUT: Packets destined for the host traverse
might be received by the firewall 'pretending' to be the INPUT chain.
something you asked for. • OUTPUT: Packets created by the host to send to
Statefull firewall: Statefull firewalls maintain context about another system traverse the OUTPUT chain.
active sessions, and use that "state information" to speed • FORWARD: Packets received by the host that
packet processing it maintains records of all connections are destined for another host traverse the
passing through the firewall and is able to determine whether FORWARD chain.
a packet is either the start of a new connection, a part of an 2) Nat
existing connection, or is an invalid packet. Though there is The Network Address Translation or Nat table is used to
still a set of static rules in such a firewall, the state of a translate the source or destination field in packets. A system
connection can in itself be one of the criteria which trigger with a static IP should use Source Network Address
specific rules. Sample of state full firewalls is Net Translation (Snat) since it uses fewer system resources.
filter/iptables. However, iptables also supports hosts with a dynamic
connection to the Internet with a masquerade feature.
IV. IPTABLES FIREWALLS Masquerade uses the current address on the interface for
Iptables is Linux's firewall which has been a part of the address translation. Nat table has three chains that explain in
kernel since version 2.4. It is often referred to as a packet following:
filter as it examines each packet transferred in every network • PREROUTING: Address translation occurs
connection to, from, and within your computer [2]. before routing, used for source address
Iptables firewalls have three components that see in • POSTROUTING: Address translation occurs
following figure. Three building blocks are tables, chains and after routing, used for destination address.
rules. • OUTPUT: Network addresses translation for
packets generated by the firewall.
3) Mangle
The mangle table is used to alter certain fields in the headers
of IP packets. It can be used to change the Time to Live or

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TTL, change the Type of Service or TOS field, or mark • NEW: The packet is trying to start a new
packets for later filtering. Mangle table has bellow chains: connection.
• PREROUTING: This chain alters packets
received via a network interface before they are • ESTABLISHED: A connection that has seen
routed. packets travel in both directions.
• POSTROUTING: this chain alters packets after
they are routed [3]. • RELATED: A packet that is starting a new
Rules are added in a list to each table. A packet is connection but is related to an existing connection.
checked against each rule in turn, starting at the top, and if it
matches that rule, then an action is taken such as accepting • INVALID: This packet is associated with no known
(ACCEPT) or dropping (DROP) the packet. Once a rule has connection. These packets should be dropped.
been matched and an action taken, then the packet is
processed according to that outcome of the rule and isn't VI. MAKING RULES
processed by further rules in the table. If a packet passes A rule is some of instructions that say to firewall how to
down through all the rules in the table and reaches the do filtering on packet and how to authenticate packets of one
bottom without being matched against any rule, then the connection. if all of options match then rules make targets.
default action for that table is taken. This is referred to as the In following illustrate structure of iptables rules.
default policy and may be to either ACCEPT or DROP the
packet. Iptables [-t table] command [match] [target/jump]
The concept of default policies within tables raises two • -t: with this option select desired table. Filter is
fundamental possibilities that we must first consider before default tables.
we decide how we are going to organize our firewall.
• Command: with this section say iptables what thing
1. We can set a default policy to DROP all packets and then does with this rule? For example –A Append one
add rules to specifically allow (ACCEPT) packets that may or more rules to the end of the selected chain.
be from trusted IP addresses, or for certain ports on which
we have services running such as bit torrent, FTP server,
• Match: the match tells the rules the condition that
Web Server, Samba file server etc.
the packet should satisfy.
2. We can set a default policy to ACCEPT all packets and
then add rules to specifically block (DROP) packets that may • There are many matches. In this section introduce
be from specific IP addresses or ranges, or for certain ports them that use in paper.
on which we have private services or no services running.
Further chains can optionally add be created in each tables. • -p: determine the protocols of packets. The
Different tables and chains are traversed according to the specified protocol can be one of tcp, udp, icmp…
source and destination of the packet. A packet that is
received via a network interface on the system goes through • -sport: determine source port of packet.
a sequence of steps before it is handled locally or frown to
another host. • -dport: determine destination port of packet.
In this paper focus is on filter table and FORWARD
chain. We install firewall in VPN server and by this way • -state: determine state of packet such as new,
monitor on packets that send out of internal network to established, related and invalid
internet and of VPN server.
• Target: target tells the rule what to do whit a packet
V. STATE OF PACKETS that is a perfect match with a match section of
The Net filter in the Linux kernel is able to keep track of packet.
network packet's state and context. This means that Net filter
can distinguish packets associated with an established Most important targets of iptables is as following:
connection from packets that are not. For example, if you Accept: iptables stops further processing. The packet is
connect to a web server with your browser, the web server handed over to the end application or the operating system
answers your browser's request and Net filter knows that for processing.
these incoming network packets are the response to the • Drop: iptables stops further processing. The
request you initiated with your browser. Using this feature packet is blocked.
allows you to instruct Net filter to only accept network • Reject: Works like the DROP target, but will
packets that are part of an established or related connection also return an error message to the host sending
initiated by you but to ignore all other network packets. the packet that the packet was blocked.

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 VII. IMPLEMENTATION MODEL Iptables –A FORWARD –m state --state NEW –p tcp --
One of the simple strategies taken to prevent of DOS dport 80 --sport 1024:65535 -m recent --name attack --
attack is to limit on the number of connection and the packet recheck –j jump dos
delivered in time. Since it is a statefull firewall, iptables has
the number of packets sent through a connection. The attack table of this address registers the packet
In this paper, there have been attempts to limit the deliver to firewalls. This command check wheatear the ip
number of TCP connection request from any ip address. For address exists in the attack table or not. if so, it goes to dos
this purpose, SYN packets are limited. Any user can send chain and if not , it goes to next command.
specific number of SYN packet within certain intervals,
however, they are dropped if they will exceed. The Iptables –A FORWARD –m state --state NEW –p tcp --
maximum number of packet is regarded 10 in a one-second dport 80 --sport 1024:65535 - m recent --name attack --set –j
intervals, though this is not obligatory and the network ACCEPT
manager can set a threshold to her/his desire.
Firewall extensions such as recent, fuzzy and limit are Through this command, the delivered packet is accepted
used to apply limit. Here the first has been used to prevent and its ip address is registered in attack table. When the
the attack. A list of ip addresses can be formed dynamically packet meets with the first condition going to dos chain, it
by using the extension that can be used in different situation follows two rules:
later [4].
Supported alternations by this extension are as follows: Iptables –A dos –m state --state NEW –p tcp --dport 80 --
sport 1024:65535 -m recent --name attack –recheck --
• --name name :The name of the list to store the second .1 --hit counts 10 –j drop
IP in or check it against. If no name is given
then DEFAULT will be used. in the first place , it check wheatear the ip address was
used within the previous .1 second. The second one, the
number of sent packets to the ip address is checked. If the
• --set: This will add the source address of the
interval between the user’s request exceed .1 second then the
packet to the list. If the source address is already
number of packet does not amount to 10 in one second
in the list, this will update the existing entry.
meaning there has been no attack. However, if the requests
are made are 10 in less than one second the new packet will
• ----recheck: This will check if the source be dropped.
address of the packet is currently in the list.
Iptables –A dos –m state --state NEW –p tcp --dport 80 --
• --seconds seconds: This option must be used in sport 1024:65535 -m recent --name attack –recheck –j
conjunction with one of --recheck or --update. accept
When used, this will narrow the match to only
happen when the address is in the list and was Thus the attack is prevented. Using the web server in
seen within the last given number of seconds. these rules is simply offered as examples and they can be
used for other servers.
• --hit count hits: This option must be used in
conjunction with one of --recheck or --update.
When used, this will narrow the match to only REFERENCES
happen when the address is in the list and [1] Chirsoph L.Schuba, Ivan.krsul, Markus G.Kuhn,Eugene H.Spafford,
packets had been received greater than or equal Aurobindo Sundaram, diego zamboni, Analysis of a Denial of service
to the given value. This option may be used Attack on TCP, COAST Laboratory Department of computer
along with `seconds' to create an even narrower Sciences Purdue University 1398 Department of Computer Sciences
west Lafayette, IN 470907-1398
match requiring a certain number of hits within
a specific time frame [4]. [2] Hime Aguirre e Oliveria Junior, Maria Augusta Soares Machado,
Fuzzy Firewalls,IBMEC – Av. Rio Bronco no.108 – 9o andar-Centro-
Rio de Janeiro-RJ-BRASIL CEP 20040
In order to prevent of SYN flood attack, this extension [3] Packet filtering HOWTO -
has been used. Consider a local network which is connected (www.netfilter.org/documentation/HOWTO//packetfiltering-
to the internet through a VPN server with firewalls being HOWTO>html)
installed in this machine. Appending appropriate rules to the [4] Net filter Extensions HOWTO -(-
database of these firewalls, the attacks are to some extent (www.netfilter.org/documentation/HOWTO//packetfiltering-
prevented. This is based on limiting the number of sending HOWTO>html
packet from a user in a specific period of time. The related
rule is explained as follow:

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