Setting Up a Traffic Control Device in a Network Environment

📌 Description

The learning objective of this lab is two-fold:

1. Understanding how firewalls work
2. Setting up a simple firewall for a network
3. Distribution of Load Balancers traffic

A stateless packet-filtering firewall is implemented, which inspects packets and decides whether to drop or forward them based on firewall rules. Through this implementation task, we will be able to grasp the basic concepts of firewall functionality.

Linux has a built-in firewall based on Netfilter, known as iptables. Students will be given a simple network topology and asked to configure iptables rules to protect the network. This project will also explore interesting applications of iptables.

🔥 Topics Covered

• Firewall
• Netfilter
• Loadable Kernel Module
• Using iptables to set up firewall rules
• Various applications of iptables
• LDAP for Centralized authentication
• NFS as a shared resource

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🛠 Languages and Utilities Used

• Python 🐍
• Ubuntu 20.04 VM 🐧

💻 Environments Used

• Windows 10 (21H2) 🖥️

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🚀 Program Walk-through

🛡 Task 1: Implementing a Simple Firewall

🔹 Task 1.A: Implement a Simple Kernel Module

🔹 Task 1.B: Implement a Simple Firewall Using Netfilter

🔍 Task 2: Experimenting with Stateless Firewall Rules

🔹 Task 2.A: Protecting the Router

🔹 Task 2.B: Protecting the Internal Network

🔹 Task 2.C: Protecting Internal Servers

📊 Task 3: Experimenting with Connection Tracking

🔹 Task 3.A:Experiment with the Connection Tracking

🔹 Task 3.B:Setting Up a Stateful Firewall

🚦 Task 4: Limiting Network Traffic

⚖️ Task 5: Load Balancing

🔚 Conclusion

This lab provided hands-on experience with fundamental firewall concepts by implementing a stateless packet-filtering firewall and configuring firewall rules using Linux's iptables.

Through this exercise, we explored:

• How packet inspection and rule-based filtering safeguard a network from unauthorized access.
• The integral role of Netfilter in the Linux kernel.
• Real-world applications of firewall rule management.

This foundational understanding sets the stage for delving into more advanced topics in network security, firewall architectures, and dynamic rule-based threat mitigation.

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