Block outgoing connections on RHEL7/CentOS7 with firewalld?

Question

RHEL7/CentOS7 features a new firewalld firewall service, that replaces the iptables service (both of which use iptables tool to interact with kernel's Netfilter underneath).

firewalld can be easily tuned to block incoming traffic, but as noted by Thomas Woerner 1,5 years ago "limiting outgoing traffic is not possible with firewalld in a simple way at the moment". And as far as I can see the situation hasn't changed since then. Or has it? Is there any way to block outgoing traffic with firewalld? If not are there any other "standard" ways (on RHEL7 distro) of blocking outgoing traffic except manually adding rules through iptables tool?

Solution 1

I didn't find any option in that nice GUI, but it is possible via direct interface

To enable only outgoing port 80:

firewall-cmd --permanent --direct --add-rule ipv4 filter OUTPUT 0 -p tcp -m tcp --dport=80 -j ACCEPT
firewall-cmd --permanent --direct --add-rule ipv4 filter OUTPUT 1 -j DROP

This will add it to permanent rules, not the runtime rules.
You will need to reload permanent rules so they become runtime rules.

firewall-cmd --reload

to display permanent rules

firewall-cmd --permanent --direct --get-all-rules

to display runtime rules

firewall-cmd --direct --get-all-rules

Solution 2

After asking the same question myself, and with some tinkering, I've gathered some nice rules for restricting outgoing traffic to HTTP/HTTPS and DNS queries:

Allow established connections:

# firewall-cmd --permanent --direct --add-rule ipv4 filter OUTPUT 0 -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT

Allow HTTP:

# firewall-cmd --permanent --direct --add-rule ipv4 filter OUTPUT 1 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

Allow HTTPS:

# firewall-cmd --permanent --direct --add-rule ipv4 filter OUTPUT 1 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT

Allow for DNS queries:

# firewall-cmd --permanent --direct --add-rule ipv4 filter OUTPUT 1 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 53 -j ACCEPT
# firewall-cmd --permanent --direct --add-rule ipv4 filter OUTPUT 1 -p udp --dport 53 -j ACCEPT

Deny everything else:

# firewall-cmd --permanent --direct --add-rule ipv4 filter OUTPUT 2 -j DROP

It might be a good idea to test first by omitting the '--permanent' argument.

I am by no means an expert, but this seems to work fine by me :)

Solution 3

Concerning the GUI; I think you find this under "Direct Configuration". To access it you have to select it in "View". I could be wrong.

Side note

To delete rules; you have to exit and then reenter.

Comments

[Casey]

How does one achieve this using the actual rich-rule language?

[Rice]

@Casey By my understanding, rich rules are strictly used for INPUT chains.

[mwfearnley]

I presume the above rules work only for ipv4 (iptables). It may be desirable to have similar rules for ipv6 (for ip6tables) or eb (for ebtables).

[mwfearnley]

Also, this killed my SSH connection to the server! See user253068's answer for how to retain established connections.

[mwfearnley]

At some point you may find it useful to remove the rules. Removing single direct rules seems tricky, but for a sledgehammer, firewall-cmd [--permanent] --direct --remove-rules ipv4 filter OUTPUT will do a bulk remove.