Jan 7, 2017 (Jun 29, 2024)

One of the issues I run into when running a server, at home or anywhere else, is the crazy amount of random attempts at SSH logins. My SSH configuration is strict enough that most of these attempts just die on the key exchange, they never even get past the handshake. Then there’s fail2ban ensuring you get temporarily blocked if you’re obviously trying to brute force anything.

Looking at the auth.log a lot of these attempts stem from Russia, China, various other parts of Asia, Africa and South America. The US is guilty of it too. I’d much rather block these attempts before we even get to an SSH handshake, HTTP or anything else.

It turns out there’s a GeoIP module for iptables that you can use to do just that. Except in very rare situations my friends and I are somewhere in the EU or the US. So it’s perfectly reasonable to drop any connection that doesn’t come from there as there’s no legitimate reason for those to arrive on most of my machines.

Installation

On Debian you’ll need xtables-addons-common and xtables-addons-dkms (yes a kernel module, exciting!) as well as libtext-csv-xs-perl installed. Once you’ve downloaded and extracted the rules you can then start blocking based on country code.

Throw the following in /etc/cron.weekly, make it executable and owned by root. This will ensure we fetch and update the GeoIP database on a weekly basis. Also, run it once by hand before you add any rules:

#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail

set +e
if ! dpkg -l xtables-addons-common >/dev/null ; then
        apt install xtables-addons-common
fi
if ! dpkg -l libtext-csv-xs-perl >/dev/null ; then
        apt install libtext-csv-xs-perl
fi
set -e

if [ ! -d /usr/share/xt_geoip ]; then
        mkdir /usr/share/xt_geoip
fi

geotmpdir=$(mktemp -d)
csv_files="${geotmpdir}/GeoIPCountryWhois.csv ${geotmpdir}/GeoIPv6.csv"
OLDPWD="${PWD}"
cd "${geotmpdir}"
/usr/lib/xtables-addons/xt_geoip_dl
/usr/lib/xtables-addons/xt_geoip_build -D /usr/share/xt_geoip ${csv_files}
cd "${OLDPWD}"
rm -r "${geotmpdir}"
exit 0

Configuration

The iptables rules themselves are very simple:

iptables -A INPUT -m geoip ! --src-cc CO,UN,TR,YC,OD,ES -i <outside interface> -m conntrack --ctstate NEW -j DROP
ip6tables -A INPUT -m geoip ! --src-cc CO,UN,TR,YC,OD,ES -i <outside interface> -m conntrack --ctstate NEW -j DROP

So I’m using conntrack and a cstate of NEW here since I want to drop incoming connections from those countries but I don’t want to drop incoming traffic for connections to anywhere for connections that this machine established itself. If you want to do that I would rather suggest you explicitly whitelist the things you want to allow connections to. You can get pretty clever by translating ASNs into ipsets and filtering on those for example.

My firewall at home is managed by firehol instead so I insert these rules on the interface configured for internet access and I do the same for my IPv6 tunnel:

ipv4 interface enp7s0f1 internet
        policy drop
        protection strong
        iptables -A in_internet -m geoip ! --src-cc CO,UN,TR,YC,OD,ES -m conntrack --ctstate NEW -j DROP
        server "ping" accept
        client all accept

ipv6 interface ipv6rd internet6
        policy drop
        protection strong
        ip6tables -A in_internet6 -m geoip ! --src-cc CO,UN,TR,YC,OD,ES -m conntrack --ctstate NEW -j DROP
        server "ping" accept
        client all accept

Due to the placement of the rule it won’t even allow ping’s from those country codes. Note that these rules don’t contain an explicit -i <outside interface> match as the in_internet* chains only match incoming traffic from the outside world.

Caveats

Keep in mind that this does GeoIP based blocking but people in countries you haven’t thought of might have a perfectly legitimate reason to want to communicate with your machine. If you’re running email services on a host employing GeoIP based blocking is probably a bad idea.

Also, this relies on a GeoIP database. So an error in that database can result in something not getting blocked or inadvertently getting blocked.

Though doing GeoIP based blocking can be handy it’s no substitute for having a good firewall in place and properly protecing any other services you have running on a machine.

security  iptables  geoip