Im looking for an IPTables aficionado who can help me here.

Here is the situation. I have a host with two IP addresses. One is management, the other is the blackhole.

The blackhole:
When we have a know-bad destination address (botnet, callout, etc) and we want to know all the sources attempting to use it, we set a company wide route to force traffic to be "next hop" to be the balckhole IP. I have snort sitting on that interface and snort tells me who the sources are that try to callout. So the source tries to go to 123.123.123.123 (bad) but instead gets routed to 10.10.10.5 (blackhole with snort). No biggie.

If you are tempted to say "Why not monitor your egress, FW, etc - that seems like overkill!?" Just trust me, this is the only way to capture all the sources given the very disparate network that we have. Lots of egress. The blackhole route eliminates multiple local egresses and forces everyone to my central IP.

So here is my request. Because the traffic destined towards the balckhole is likely malicious - I am paranoid. I want to put in an IPtables rule to ensure that my blackhole IP is fully passive - it does not respond. But I DO need it to reply to ARPs so that the switch sees the blackhole IP as alive and continues make it routable (and possibly ICMP for convenience/heath checks)

So Can I put in a rule that basically allows everything IN to the interface, but only allows ARPs (or maybe just all layer two stuff?) out? If possible Arps and ICMP to specific set of destinations?

Is that all crazy?

Thank you! Checks in the mail.

Maybe i'm missing somethign here but if you want to allow arp and icmp why not just drop all tcp/udp on outbound.


That seems way to easy maybe I'm overlooking something if I am let me know and I can give you something more specific.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks Kustom42 - that may be all I need. I would need to specify only the blackhole interface, but yes that might be all.
I do not know IPtables, so if it is just that simple - awesome.

Yes, just use the -i option to specify the interface.

Read over: http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-...allow-ssh.html


It talks about locking down the entire system except for incoming ssh connections and outbound ssh traffic on an already established connection.

1 members found this post helpful.

That is perfect. Thanks. +rep.