[Openswan Users] Firewall rules for openswan behind NAT

Fred Weston fred.weston at lpga.com
Thu Nov 21 13:41:57 UTC 2013


Each openswan box does only have one interface.  On that interface it has a 10.x.x.x IP address which serves as both access to the local subnet as well as Internet access via 1:1 NAT to a public IP.

-----Original Message-----
From: users-bounces at lists.openswan.org [mailto:users-bounces at lists.openswan.org] On Behalf Of Neal Murphy
Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2013 12:21 AM
To: users at openswan.org
Subject: Re: [Openswan Users] Firewall rules for openswan behind NAT

On Wednesday, November 20, 2013 10:57:35 PM Fred Weston wrote:
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: users-bounces at lists.openswan.org
> >[mailto:users-bounces at lists.openswan.org] On Behalf Of Neal Murphy
> >Subject: Re: [Openswan Users] Firewall rules for openswan behind NAT
> >
> >On Wednesday, November 20, 2013 05:14:55 PM Fred Weston wrote:
> ...
> >If you are saying that *no* traffic passes from one end to the other
> >unless you forward their ports inbound to the destination openswan
> >server, then I must suspect that no traffic is passing >through the
> >tunnel (into which the outer firewalls will not and cannot see). Are
> >you
> >*sure* the client nodes have their routes set up correctly?
>
> Yes, this is exactly what I'm saying.  The traceroutes confirm that
> the traffic is passing through the two openswan boxes, there is no
> other path between the two networks so the traffic *must* be traversing the tunnel.
> That being said, I 100% agree with you that this makes absolutely no
> sense UNLESS the traffic is only being tunneled and is not being
> encrypted.  In that case this could make sense because the firewall
> might be able to see the tunneled traffic and apply its ruleset to it.
> Everything seems to indicate that traffic is being encrypted though,
> so the firewall controlling what traffic can come into the far
> openswan box shouldn't be able to see any of the raw traffic, all it should see is encrypted noise.

All the firewall should see is UDP packets on port 4500; it shouldn't act on what's in the payload (unless it's using deep packet inspection--DPI).

>
> The way AWS handles routing is a bit different than how you would
> normally handle it.  For instance, when I set a route for 10.1.0.0/16,
> I don't set an IP address as the next hop, I set a network interface
> which just happens to be the virtual NIC assigned to the openswan VM.
> Otherwise, yes I am pretty sure the routing should not be suspect.
>
> >But I'm *really* beginning to suspect the configuration of the
> >openswan system. What type of system is it running on?
>
> So am I.  It's a t1.micro instance running Amazon Linux.
> Specifically, it was launched from their NAT AMI (machine image).
>
> >Are you certain there is no other tunneling going on?
>
> The only other thing I could think of is that since the image I'm
> using was purpose built for doing NAT, that perhaps there were some
> existing firewall rules on the openswan boxes that could be monkeying with things.
> I tried to list the iptables ruleset, but it came up empty.  Since the
> boxes are designed to do NAT, shouldn't I see some sort of iptables rules?
>  Is there something other than iptables that could be in use that I
> should check?

No, only iptables (netfilter) wrangles packets.

Wait. Does the openswan machine have only one interface? If so, you're probably well beyond my expertise; I can handle OS when it uses two NICs. If it has two, your diagram and routing are wrong.
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