Rule (Rule 8). If someone tries to access the Web server with non-HTTP traffic (other than port 80), then the firewall skips this rule and goes to the next.
Proxy server rules allow an organization to restrict all access to a device. The external firewall would be configured as shown in Table 6-13. The effective use of a proxy server of course requires that the DNS entries be configured as if the proxy server were the Web server. The proxy server is then configured to repackage any HTTP request packets into a new packet and retransmit to the Web server inside the firewall. The retransmission of the repackaged request requires that the rule shown in
Table 6-14 enables the proxy server at 10.10.10.5 to send to the internal router, assuming the IP address for the internal Web server is 10.10.10.10. Note that in situations where an internal NAT server is used, the rule for the inbound interface uses the externally routable address, because the device performs rule filtering before it performs address translation. For the outbound interface, however, the address is in the native 192.168.x.x format. The restriction on the source address then prevents anyone else from accessing the Web server from outside the internal filtering router/firewall.
Rule Set 8: The cleanup rule. As a general practice in firewall rule construction, if a request for a service is not explicitly allowed by policy, that request should be denied by a rule. The rule shown in Table 6-15 implements this practice and blocks any requests that aren’t explicitly allowed by other rules. Additional rules restricting access to specific servers or devices can be added, but they must be sequenced before the cleanup rule. Order is extremely important, as misplacement of a particular rule can result in unforeseen results. One organization installed a new $50,000 firewall, only to discover that the security the firewall provided was too perfect—that is, nothing was allowed in, and nothing was allowed out! It wasn’t until the firewall administrators realized that the rule base was out of sequence that the problem was resolved. Tables 6-16 through 6-19 show the rule sets, in their proper sequences, for both the external and internal firewalls. Note that the first rule prevents spoofing of internal IP addresses. The rule allowing responses to internal communications (appearing in Table 6-16 as rule 6), comes after the four rules prohibiting direct communications to or from the firewall (rules 2–5 in Table 6-16). In reality rules