ASA Firewall Rules of Thumb

Some important Cisco ASA firewall details I and others have learned and shared over the years:

• Don’t use “security-level” as your method of security. In the long term at best “security-level” will cause you to block traffic you didn’t expect, at worst, it will allow traffic you didn’t want. Why? Well…
• If you add an ACL on the “in” side of any interface (that is “into the ASA”), once it’s in the ASA, the security level doesn’t matter anymore. It’s very easy to forget this. However you can protect yourself by…
• Always add “out” rules. Any “in” rules should be matched by “out” rules on the final destination interface. This is insurance in case you missed or were overly broad on your “in” rules.
• Configure all of the interfaces to the same “security-level”. If you enable “same-security-traffic permit inter-interface” be careful as it allows traffic to flow to other same security levels without ACLs. You don’t want traffic to flow when you haven’t allowed it explicitly. The only exception to using different security levels might be the “outside” interface, which you may want to set to “security-level 0”. However, assuming “outside” is the Internet, ideally you want to be explicit there too. Otherwise you’re potentially setting yourself up for easy, unlogged, data exfiltration (among other things).
• Remember that the ASA is a stateful firewall. If you establish some sort of connection out of an interface, the firewall should see that the return traffic belongs to the conversation and allow it through regardless. For the most part you don’t need to explicitly create return rules (or use the old IOS “established” trick).
• If you’re trying to turn up a firewall on a network that existed, but was never firewalled before and you are having difficult categorizing the existing traffic, place the rules that you know are correct into the ASA, then add a “permit ip any any log” entry at the end. This will send logging of what fell to the wildcard rule to your syslog server, which you can then evaluate later. Once analyzed and missing rules in place, turn it to a “deny ip any any” and you’re done. Remember you can also do packet capture on the ASA as well.
• Never trust a 3rd party. If they are coming into your network and saying they are properly filtering traffic toward you, filter them again anyway. First, their error could be your exploit, second you can’t assume their firewalls aren’t going to get hacked. Protect your network like it was your own child.
• Beware of mixing ASA “access-list”s and ASA VPNs on the same firewall. Unless you want to enter “filter” hell, which generally you can only apply usefully in one direction, turn off VPN bypass with “no sysopt connection permit-vpn”. If you don’t do this YOUR VPN TRAFFIC BYPASSES ALL “access-list” RULES! Note that once you disable “VPN bypass”, your VPN traffic will appear to come from the “in” of the interface it initially arrived at. Since that’s usually “outside” and the Internet, you can have a seemingly less-than pretty mix of private addressing and public addressing to deal with on your Internet interface. This can make it cleaner to get a dedicated ASA for VPN and hang it off an arm of your firewall ASA.

The most critical thing with firewalls is don’t be lazy. Take the time to do the configuration and rules needed. It takes extra effort up front, but a failure is far more expensive.