Firewalls prevent unauthorized access to or from a private network. A firewall is essentially a “defender” host that must fight off minor to complex attacks. Multi-layered, meshed protection is needed in today’s hazardous network environments. With MatrixIT, there is no need to feel uneasy.

Leave the security of your data in our hands. We understand the absolute importance of the confidentiality of your information, and we’ll keep it that way.

Keep your network secure with Managed Firewalls from MatrixIT.  Call 1-866-648-8324 option 1.  Speak to a representative about our managed firewall solution and Managed VPN connectivity to interconnect your locations either Site to Site or Dial in VPN

Firewall

  • Filtering by source and destination IP, IP protocol, source and destination port for TCP and UDP traffic
  • Able to limit simultaneous connections on a per-rule basis
  • utilizes p0f, an advanced passive OS/network fingerprinting utility to allow you to filter by the Operating System initiating the connection. Want to allow FreeBSD and Linux machines to the Internet, but block Windows machines? we can do so (amongst many other possibilities) by passively detecting the Operating System in use.
  • Option to log or not log traffic matching each rule.
  • Highly flexible policy routing possible by selecting gateway on a per-rule basis (for load balancing, failover, multiple WAN, etc.)
  • Aliases allow grouping and naming of IPs, networks and ports. This helps keep your firewall ruleset clean and easy to understand, especially in environments with multiple public IPs and numerous servers.
  • Transparent layer 2 firewalling capable – can bridge interfaces and filter traffic between them, even allowing for an IP-less firewall (though you probably want an IP for management purposes).
  • Packet normalization –  “‘Scrubbing’ is the normalization of packets so there are no ambiguities in interpretation by the ultimate destination of the packet. The scrub directive also reassembles fragmented packets, protecting some operating systems from some forms of attack, and drops TCP packets that have invalid flag combinations.”
    • Enabled by default

State Table

The firewall’s state table maintains information on your open network connections. , by default all rules are stateful.

Most firewalls lack the ability to finely control your state table. Allowing granular control of your state table is included.

  • Adjustable state table size
  • On a per-rule basis:
    • Limit simultaneous client connections
    • Limit states per host
    • Limit new connections per second
    • Define state timeout
    • Define state type
  • State types – multiple options for state handling.
    • Keep state – Works with all protocols. Default for all rules.
    • Modulate state – Works only with TCP. Will generate strong Initial Sequence Numbers (ISNs) on behalf of the host.
    • Synproxy state – Proxies incoming TCP connections to help protect servers from spoofed TCP SYN floods. This option includes the functionality of keep state and modulate state combined.
    • None – Do not keep any state entries for this traffic. This is very rarely desirable, but is available because it can be useful under some limited circumstances.
  • State table optimization options – pf offers four options for state table optimization.
    • Normal – the default algorithm
    • High latency – Useful for high latency links, such as satellite connections. Expires idle connections later than normal.
    • Aggressive – Expires idle connections more quickly. More efficient use of hardware resources, but can drop legitimate connections.
    • Conservative – Tries to avoid dropping legitimate connections at the expense of increased memory usage and CPU utilization.

Network Address Translation (NAT)

  • Port forwards including ranges and the use of multiple public IPs
  • 1:1 NAT for individual IPs or entire subnets.
  • Outbound NAT
    • Default settings NAT all outbound traffic to the WAN IP. In multiple WAN scenarios, the default settings NAT outbound traffic to the IP of the WAN interface being used.
    • Advanced Outbound NAT allows this default behavior to be disabled, and enables the creation of very flexible NAT (or no NAT) rules.
  • NAT Reflection – in some configurations, NAT reflection is possible so services can be accessed by public IP from internal networks.

Redundancy

CARP from OpenBSD allows for hardware failover. Two or more firewalls can be configured as a failover group. If one interface fails on the primary or the primary goes offline entirely, the secondary becomes active. Includes configuration synchronization capabilities, so you make your configuration changes on the primary and they automatically synchronize to the secondary firewall.

pfsync ensures the firewall’s state table is replicated to all failover configured firewalls. This means your existing connections will be maintained in the case of failure, which is important to prevent network disruptions.

Limitations

  • Only works with static public IPs, does not work with DHCP, PPPoE, PPTP, or BigPond type WANs (will be resolved in a future release)
  • Requires a minimum of three public IP addresses (will be resolved in a future release)
  • Backup firewalls are idle (active-passive failover), no active-active clustering is possible at this time.
  • Failover is not instantaneous, it takes about 5 seconds to switch a backup host to master. During this time no traffic will be passed, but existing states will maintain connectivity after failover is completed. This 5 second outage during a failure isn’t even noticeable in most environments.

Load Balancing

Outbound Load Balancing

Outbound load balancing is used with multiple WAN connections to provide load balancing and failover capabilities. Traffic is directed to the desired gateway or load balancing pool on a per-firewall rule basis.

Inbound Load Balancing

Inbound load balancing is used to distribute load between multiple servers. This is commonly used with web servers, mail servers, and others. Servers that fail to respond to ping requests or TCP port connections are removed from the pool.

VPN

Three options for VPN connectivity, IPsec, OpenVPN, and PPTP.

IPsec

IPsec allows connectivity with any device supporting standard IPsec. This is most commonly used for site to site connectivity to other installations, other open source firewalls (m0n0wall, etc.), and most all commercial firewall solutions (Cisco, Juniper, etc.). It can also be used for mobile client connectivity.

OpenVPN

OpenVPN is a flexible, powerful SSL VPN solution supporting a wide range of client operating systems. See theOpenVPN website for details on its abilities.
Limitations

  • Not all of the capabilities of OpenVPN are supported yet. Support for virtually all of OpenVPN’s capabilities will be included in the next release.
  • Filtering of OpenVPN traffic is not yet possible. Support for this is in 2.0.

PPTP Server

PPTP is a popular VPN option because nearly every OS has a built in PPTP client, including every Windows release since Windows 95 OSR2. See this Wikipedia article for more information on the PPTP protocol.

The PPTP Server can use a local user database, or a RADIUS server for authentication. RADIUS accounting is also supported. Firewall rules on the PPTP interface control traffic initiated by PPTP clients.

PPPoE Server

Offers a PPPoE server. For more information on the PPPoE protocol, A local user database can be used for authentication, and RADIUS authentication with optional accounting is also supported.

Reporting and Monitoring

RRD Graphs

The RRD graphs maintain historical information on the following.

  • CPU utilization
  • Total throughput
  • Firewall states
  • Individual throughput for all interfaces
  • Packets per second rates for all interfaces
  • WAN interface gateway(s) ping response times
  • Traffic shaper queues on systems with traffic shaping enable

Real Time Information

Historical information is important, but sometimes it’s more important to see real time information.

SVG graphs are available that show real time throughput for each interface.

For traffic shaper users, the Status -> Queues screen provides a real time display of queue usage using AJAX updated gauges.

The front page includes AJAX gauges for display of real time CPU, memory, swap and disk usage, and state table size.

Dynamic DNS

A Dynamic DNS client is included to allow you to register your public IP with a number of dynamic DNS service providers.

  • DynDNS
  • DHS
  • DyNS
  • easyDNS
  • No-IP
  • ODS.org
  • ZoneEdit

A client is also available for RFC 2136 dynamic DNS updates, for use with DNS servers like BIND which support this means of updating.

Captive Portal

Captive portal allows you to force authentication, or redirection to a click through page for network access. This is commonly used on hot spot networks, but is also widely used in corporate networks for an additional layer of security on wireless or Internet access. For more information on captive portal technology in general, see theWikipedia article on the topic. The following is a list of features in the Captive Portal.

  • Maximum concurrent connections – Limit the number of connections to the portal itself per client IP. This feature prevents a denial of service from client PCs sending network traffic repeatedly without authenticating or clicking through the splash page.
  • Idle timeout – Disconnect clients who are idle for more than the defined number of minutes.
  • Hard timeout – Force a disconnect of all clients after the defined number of minutes.
  • Logon pop up window – Option to pop up a window with a log off button.
  • URL Redirection – after authenticating or clicking through the captive portal, users can be forcefully redirected to the defined URL.
  • MAC filtering – by default, filters using MAC addresses. If you have a subnet behind a router on a captive portal enabled interface, every machine behind the router will be authorized after one user is authorized. MAC filtering can be disabled for these scenarios.
  • Authentication options – There are three authentication options available.
    • No authentication – This means the user just clicks through your portal page without entering credentials.
    • Local user manager – A local user database can be configured and used for authentication.
    • RADIUS authentication – This is the preferred authentication method for corporate environments and ISPs. It can be used to authenticate from Microsoft Active Directory and numerous other RADIUS servers.
  • RADIUS capabilities
    • Forced re-authentication
    • Able to send Accounting updates
    • RADIUS MAC authentication allows captive portal to authenticate to a RADIUS server using the client’s MAC address as the user name and password.
    • Allows configuration of redundant RADIUS servers.
  • HTTP or HTTPS – The portal page can be configured to use either HTTP or HTTPS.
  • Pass-through MAC and IP addresses – MAC and IP addresses can be white listed to bypass the portal. Any machines with NAT port forwards will need to be bypassed so the reply traffic does not hit the portal. You may wish to exclude some machines for other reasons.
  • File Manager – This allows you to upload images for use in your portal pages.

DHCP Server and Relay

Includes both DHCP Server and Relay functionality