[Open-scap] RHEL FirewallD Requirement for Hosts that have well defined STATIC configurations

Šimon Lukašík slukasik at redhat.com
Thu Oct 8 16:07:27 UTC 2015


On 10/07/2015 07:55 PM, Jeffrey Hawkins wrote:
>
> A question on Requirements, in particular STIGs.
>
> Looking thru the work-in-progress it appears there is a callout for
> usage of FIREWALLD, otherwise, a Finding.  I would have thought it would
> be acceptable for RHEL Hosts with static configurations using IPTABLES
> is acceptable.  We have RHEL Application Server Hosts (Headless)  that
> have static services and configurations with well defined static
> IPTABLES based rules for INPUT/OUTPUT (FORWARDING disabled).  There are
> no dynamic changes that are ever applied to these Hosts, and if there
> are changes, we explicitly account for these.    We are moving from
> RHEL6 to RHEL7 and do not see any security benefit in moving the INPUT
> rules set to be managed by FIREWALLD. If FIREWALLD evolves to be a
> complete controller of IPTABLES Rules, rather than a mixture of
> FIREWALLD manages some, while other must be manually configured in
> IPTABLES, the we will move to FIREWALLD. We would like to see the STIG
> Requirements provide for an OR Case to allow for STATIC based IPTABLES
> Usage, rather than requiring usage of FIREWALLD.
>
> Who is handling this area to discuss this, and make acceptable the usage
> of STATIC IPTABLES Rules ?
>
> Jeff
>

Hello Jeff,

I think you are touching some of the harder questions here.

We are in transition period. There is a lot of deployments and 
configuration systems touching iptables directly. On the other hand, 
firewalld abstraction can make some of the use-cases easier.

If the question was, can a general guidance like STIG require everyone 
to use firewalld. It could, however, it may not get adopted due to the 
upper mentioned facts.

If the question was, will the SSG upstream accept my contribution if I 
choose either part. The answer is yes. We can have OVAL checks for 
firewalld and iptables combined and then XCCDF description that 
describes the rational rather then technical detail. If you happen to 
use iptables (or firewalld) heavily in your organization, feel free to 
start with adressing your use case.

Thoughts?
~š.


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