8 Best Open Source Firewall to Protect Your Network

Data breach statistics show millions of data get stolen or lost every day.

How secure is your network?

Do you use any firewall to protect your network infrastructure?

Earlier, I wrote about a cloud-managed firewall and received feedback to write about a FREE or open-source firewall.

The following free firewall is different than a web application firewall. They are to protect infrastructure instead of code or application.

pfSense

An open-source security solution with a custom kernel based on FreeBSD OS. pfSense is one of the leading network firewalls with a commercial level of features.

pfSense is available as a hardware device, virtual appliance, and downloadable binary (community edition).

What you get in FREE is community edition.

I like their extensive documentation, well explained, and easy to follow. On a high-level, some of the worth mentioning pfSense features are:

• Firewall – IP/port filtering, limiting connections, layer two capable, scrubbing
• State table – by default all rules are stateful, multiple configurations available for state handling,
• Server load balancing – inbuilt LB to distribute the load between multiple backend servers
• NAT (Network address translation) – port forwarding, reflection
• HA (High-availability) – failover to secondary if primary fail
• Multi-WAN (wide area network) – use more than one internet connection.
• VPN (a virtual private network) – support IPsec and OpenVPN
• Reporting – Keep historical resources utilization information
• Monitoring – real-time monitoring
• Dynamic DNS – multiple DNS clients are included
• DHCP & Relay ready

More than some of the commercial firewall features you get in FREE.

Amazing, isn’t it?

Not only that, but you also have an option to install packages with just one click.

• Security – a stunner, snort, tinc, nmap, arpwatch
• Monitoring – iftop, ntopng, softflowd, urlsnarf, darkstat, mailreport
• Networking – netio, nut, Avahi
• Routing – frr, olsrd, routed, OpenBGPD
• Services – iperf, widentd, syslog-ng, bind, acme, imspector, git, dns-server

pfSense looks promising and worth giving a try. Check out Kamatera if looking for pfSense hosting.

IPFire

IPFire is built on top of Netfilter and trusted by thousands of companies worldwide.

IPFire can be used as a firewall, proxy server, or VPN gateway – all depends on how you configure it. It got great customization flexibility.

IDS (intrusion detection system) is inbuilt, so attacks are detected and prevented from day one. And with the help of Guardian (optional add-on), you can implement automatic prevention.

You can get it started with IPFire in less than 30 minutes.

OPNSense

OPNSense is a fork of pfSense and m0n0wall. GUI is available in multiple languages like French, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Russian, etc.

OPNSense got many enterprise levels of security and firewall features like IPSec, VPN, 2FA, QoS, IDPS, Netflow, Proxy, Webfilter, etc.

It is compatible with 32bit or 64bit system architecture and available to download as ISO image and USB installer.

NG Firewall

NG Firewall by untangle is a single platform where you can get everything you need to protect your organization network.

It got the beautiful dashboard, experience the demo here. It works like an app store where you can enable or disable a particular app (module) based on the requirement.

In the FREE version, you get NG Firewall platform, free apps, and 14 days trial of paid features.

Smoothwall

Smoothwall Express is a free solution with a simple web interface to configure, manage the firewall.

Smoothwall express supports LAN, DMZ, Internal, External network firewalling, web proxy for acceleration, traffic stats, etc.

Shutting down or rebooting is possible directly through the web interface.

Note: The following two programs are specific for Linux servers.

ufw (uncomplicated firewall) works with Ubuntu. It provides a command-line interface to manage the Linux kernel packet filtering system (netfilter).

csf (ConfigServer security) is supported and tested on the following OS and virtual servers.

• RHEL/CentOS
• CloudLinux
• Fedora
• OpenSUSE
• Debian
• Ubuntu
• Slackware
• OpenVZ
• KVM
• VirtualBox
• XEN
• VMware
• Virtuozzo
• UML

csf is a stateful firewall, login detection, and security solution for Linux servers.

Endian

Endian Firewall Community (EFW) is a powerful, easy to install and use Linux based security product for home and small networks. It can transform a bare-metal hardware appliance into a powerful and effective unified threat prevention and management solution comprising of a firewall, an antivirus, VPN, and content filtering capabilities in a single box.

The stateful firewall allows you to protect your network from a wide range of attacks and threats in addition to offering a well-protected VPN to secure the environment for your remote employees.

EFW key features include;

• Provides real-time monitoring, logging, and reporting of the network activities, resource usage such as bandwidth, etc.
• Enhancing secure remote access through the Endian community VPN
• Enhanced event management.
• Improved security for network web and email services in addition to an intrusion prevention system (IPS).

Conclusion

I hope above listed free solution for firewall helps you to save money and protect your infrastructure from being hacked.

5 Best Free Open Source Firewall Software For Windows

Here is a list of best free open source Firewall software for Windows. These open source firewall software are completely free and you can also download and modify their source codes.

These software allow you to control incoming and outgoing network traffic to ensure security. Through some software, you can easily provide system-wide firewall protection. The advantage of system-wide protection is its ability to control the network access of every process and application of a system. Plus, these software let you manually enable or disable the network access of applications and processes. In some, you can also create whitelists and blacklists of applications that can and cannot access the network. Some of the firewall software are browser (Chrome and Firefox) extensions that only restricts network access within a browser. Through browser-based firewall extensions, you can easily restrict access to websites, webpages, and associated elements like images, videos, CSS elements, java scripts, etc.

In few software, you can also view the real-time data of all processes and applications which are using the network with their status. Other important features like Rules (to specify custom firewall rules for applications) and Network Protocol (to toggle between network protocols) are also present in some software. In general, all of these are very capable software and tools that you can use to add firewall protection to your system and browsers. Go through the list to know more about these software.

My Favorite Open Source Firewall Software For Windows:

Simplewall is my favorite software because it offers system-wide firewall protection. Plus, it shows the names of various applications and processes which use the network in real-time. It also lets you manually specify which programs and processes can access the network.

You can also check out lists of best free Firewall, Open Source Bandwidth Monitor, and Open Source Data Recovery software for Windows.

Simplewall

Simplewall is a free open source firewall software for Windows. It is a lightweight firewall software through which you can control and monitor network activity on your computer. To configure various network activities, it offers multiple sections like Blocklist, System Rules, User Rules, Packages, Services, and more. Now, let’s check out the main features of this firewall software.

Main Features:

• Blocklist: In this section, you can view all the blocked apps and services which are identified as unsafe by this software. You can manually select and enable any blocked app that you want.
• System Rules: It shows all the enabled and disabled network rules of a system like IGMP, SSDP, LLMNR, UPnP, etc.
• Settings: From settings, you can enable or disable Microsoft servers services (Microsoft spying and telemetry servers, Microsoft update servers, and Microsoft application servers). In addition to that, you can enable or disable various Network, Security, and Advanced rules.
• Apps: It shows all the apps which use the network. You can allow or disallow any app from accessing the network.
• Services: It shows a list of services that use the network. Just like apps, you can allow certain services to use the network and disallow others.
• Add Rules: It is an advanced feature that lets you create your own rules that you can apply to some or all system apps.

Additional Feature:

• Network: In this section, you can view various services, programs, and apps that are using the network in real-time along with their port number, destination address, protocol, and connection status.

Final Thoughts:

It is a feature-rich open source firewall software through which you can easily control apps and services which can access the network.

Топ 4 Open Source Web Application Firewall

Тысячи веб-сайтов ежедневно подвергаются успешным атакам мошенников из-за неправильной настройки или уязвимостей в коде. Web Application Firewall (WAF) — это один из лучших способов защитить свой сайт от существующих угроз.

Если сайт доступен для поиска в интернете, то владелец может использовать онлайн-инструменты для сканирования ресурса на наличие уязвимостей, чтобы получить полное представление о том, насколько он защищен.

Коммерческий WAF может стоить немало, и если человек находится в поисках бесплатного решения для обеспечения защиты своего веб-сайта, то следующий список Open Source Web Application Firewall может ему пригодиться.

ModSecurity

ModSecurity, разработанный TrustWave, представляет собой один из самых популярных межсетевых экранов для веб-приложений, который поддерживает Apache HTTP, Microsoft IIS и Nginx.

Бесплатные функции ModSecurity будут полезны для пользователя, если он желает получить защиту от следующих угроз:

• Межсайтовый скриптинг
• Трояны
• Утечка информации
• SQL-инъекция
• Распространенные веб-атаки
• Вредоносная активность

В ModSecurity нет графического интерфейса, и если пользователю он нужен, можно подумать о WAF-FLE. Он позволяет хранить, производить поиск и просматривать события.

NAXSI

NAXSI – это инъекция nginx Anti-XSS & SQL. Как можно уже догадаться, данный вариант подойдет только для веб-сервера Nginx, в основном – он предназначен для защиты от межсайтового скриптинга и атак типа SQL-инъекций.

Фильтр NAXSI способен принять и отправлять запросы, а конфигурация защиты будет действовать по умолчанию, как межсетевой экран DROP-by-default. Пользователю следует добавить правило ACCEPT, чтобы все работало верно.

WebKnight

WebKnight WAF подходит для Microsoft IIS. Это фильтр ISAPI, который защищает веб-сервер, блокируя вредоносные запросы. WebKnight обеспечивает безопасность и противодействует следующим мошенническим действиям:

• Переполнение буфера
• Атака Directory traversal
• Кодирование символов
• SQL-инъекция
• Блокировка Bad robots
• Хотлинкинг
• Лобовая атака

В конфигурации по умолчанию регистрируются все заблокированные запросы, пользователь может настроить данный параметр в соответствии с его потребностями. В WebKnight версии 3.0 есть веб-интерфейс администратора, где человек способен выполнять задачи администрирования, включая сбор статистических данных.

Shadow Daemon

Shadow Daemon обнаруживает, записывает и предотвращает веб-атаки путем фильтрации запросов. Он имеет собственный интерфейс, где человек может заниматься администрированием и управлением WAF. Поддерживает PHP, Perl и Python.

Shadow Daemon способен обнаружить следующие атаки:

• SQL-инъекция
• Инъекция XML
• Инъекция кода
• Инъекция команд
• Межсайтовый скриптинг
• Бэкдор доступ
• Локальная / удаленная инклюзия файлов

Большинство приложений Open Source являются бесплатными, но пользователь не получает постоянной поддержки и будет вынужден полагаться на свой опыт и помощь сообщества. Среди коммерческих WAF выделяют:

• Cloudflare (облачный сервис)
• Incapsula (облачный сервис)
• F5 ASM
• Коммерческие правила TrustWave ModSecurity
• StackPath
• SUCURI (облачный сервис)