IP Masquerading Concepts Under LINUX 2.2

IP Masquerading Concepts

IP masquerading is a facility in the Linux kernel that can manipulate packets so that they appear to originate from addresses other than the original source. Before you think that this is some hacker tool, the masquerading is performed only during the forwarding of a packet. (It would make no sense if the router itself originates the packet or if the router were the destination of the packet.) The kernel performs some acrobatics to make the process transparent to both the sender and the receiver. It does a good job in all but a few rare cases.

Before we talk about configuring IP masquerading, let's start with an example of why one might need it, and what happens to a packet when it's masqueraded. The primary function of masquerading is to obscure the IP address of a client from a server located on a separate network. The reasons for doing this vary. The most common one is that the client has an address such that the server either would not or could not respond to a connection request originating from that client. This situation is depicted in Figure 1, where the client can contact the server, but the server response will never reach the client.

Figure 1

A scenario for IP masquerading.

Remember that the private address space may be used by any private net, and as such may be routed internally at B's network to some other machine with the address 192.168.24.17. To remedy the situation, the router alters the packet so that it appears to have originated from its external interface R_B, which is an Internet-valid address. When the server sends a response, it's routed to R, which then forwards the packet to client A. The topology, of course, is usually much more complex than that depicted in Figure 1; there may be many hops between the router and the server. The result, however, is the same. The packet appears to have an Internet-valid source address and will find its way back to the router to be unmasqueraded.

IP Masquerading Under the Hood

Now that we're motivated to use masquerading, we can talk about what's really happening to the packet when it's masqueraded. As an example, let's say that client A would like to connect to server B using either TCP or UDP.¹ The client is going to send from port x to port y on the server. In order to reach B, A first sends the packet to its gateway, which has address R_A. The gateway interface on the B side is R_B.

Taking a close look at such a transaction, you'll see that three different types of addresses are involved. First, each machine has an Ethernet address, useful only for transmission of frames to other machines on its local subnet. The next layer includes the IP address of the source and the destination. Finally, for the TCP and UDP protocols, there is a specific port on both the client and the server. Normally, the client port is not significant and is a value between 1024 and 65534, arbitrarily chosen by the operating system.² However, the server response must arrive on the port where the client expects it—otherwise, the client doesn't know that the packet is a response to its send.

Forwarding Without Masquerading

Let's list the sequence of a send/respond transaction when no masquerading occurs, and then follow the values of the three addresses in Table 1:

1. Client A wants to send to the service running on port y on server B, so it builds a packet with B's IP address as the destination. Because B is part of a different subnet, client A knows to forward the packet to its gateway, R. It does this by setting the destination in the Ethernet frame to R.

2. R receives the packet and notes that its destination is a remote IP address. Because R is configured to forward, it accepts the packet and determines which interface to use to forward the packet. It then places B's Ethernet address as the destination address in the Ethernet frame and sends the packet. (In the general case where B is still several hops away, it determines which gateway is the next hop and sends to it, where the same procedure takes place.)

3. Server B receives the Ethernet frame and notes that the destination address for the packet is its own. Therefore, it accepts the packet and sends it to the process that has a socket bound and listening to the destination port y in the TCP packet header.

4. The same procedure is executed in reverse for the response. This time, the TCP header destination port is x, and the source port is y. The IP packet header has B as the source and A as the destination. The Ethernet frame headers take on the appropriate values as the packet makes its way back to client A.

Table 1

Protocol Headers During Normal Forwarding

Forwarding with Masquerading

Now take the same situation and configure the router to masquerade traffic from subnet_A or traffic to subnet_B. The following steps will occur during a transaction between client A and server B:

1. Client send/router receive. A sends a packet to B via its gateway R.

2. Router masquerade. The packet pattern-matching on the router R notices that this connection should be masqueraded. It builds a new set of IP headers for the packet payload in which the source IP address of the packet is replaced by the IP address of the forwarding interface on R. R opens a free port, z, and fixes up the packet so that it now originates from R:z.

3. Router forward/server receive. The newly massaged packet is forwarded to B.

4. Server reply/router receive. B's server process receives the packet and builds a packet to reply to it. The reply is to R at port z, because these are the source values B sees in the packet headers. B puts this packet on the wire to R.

5. Router unmasquerade. The kernel on R recognizes the packet as a response to a previously masqueraded send by the destination IP and port tuple (R, z). When it opened the socket corresponding to port z, it left special instructions there to forward responses to that port to A at port x. Therefore, it unmasquerades the packet by fixing up the headers and then forwarding it to client A. The fixup includes replacing the source IP address to be that of B, and the sending port to be y.

6. Router forward/client receive. R puts the packet on the wire. A receives the server response, which automagically appears to have come directly from the server at B. Neither A nor B is the wiser.

In summary, forwarding involves fixing up the Link Layer headers, while masquerading is the act of fixing up Network Layer headers (IP address) and Transport Protocol Layer headers (port). Table 2 and Figure 2 illustrate the step-by-step exchange explained above. The items in the table that are changed by the masquerading router are marked with an asterisk (*).

Table 2

Protocol Headers While Masquerading

Figure 2

IP forwarding and masquerading over Ethernet.

The values reported in the tables are the same values you would see in the output of a packet sniffer if you traced such a transaction. In this case, there are four different points where you could monitor the packet flow (at A, R_A, R_B, and B). If you watched all four, you would see that both interfaces on subnet_A see the same traffic, as do both interfaces on subnet_B. I point this out to show that the kernel modifies the packets between the interfaces—that is, while it internally forwards the packet from one interface to another. The upshot is that you can perform your monitoring directly on any interface on the masquerading router.

Protocol-Specific Masquerading

You can fool some of the packets some of the time, but you can't fool all of the packets all of the time. The example presented in the preceding section represents one class of TCP/IP connection: a TCP stream. What about masquerading UDP and ICMP? As long as they are well-mannered, the IP masquerading code in ./net/ipv4/ip masq.c handles all three without any additional configuration. What do I mean by well-mannered? IP masquerading works "out of the box" for all TCP– and UDP–based applications based on a single fixed server port and arbitrarily chosen client port, where the machine being masqueraded (the client) is the initiator of the connection.

How far does this get you? It handles Telnet, ssh, rlogin, HTTP, pings (ICMP) and traceroutes (a combination of ICMP and UDP), DNS (often UDP, but can be TCP), NNTP, and many others. But, as you already know, it's what doesn't work that people notice. The first notable exception is FTP. FTP likes to open connections from the server back to the client, contrary to the direction you're trying masquerade (and/or firewall).

To handle a case like this, the masquerading code needs to understand something about the application protocol so that it can watch for the beginning of a transfer and know to connect the inbound socket connection to the client, not to the router. Remember, the process running on the client is expecting that inbound connection, not the router. To make things even more complicated, the FTP protocol also has a passive mode in which this inbound connection doesn't occur. The client and server negotiate a new pair of ports and use these to build a stream connection for the data transmission.

The Linux kernel developers weren't satisfied with IP masquerading without FTP, so they added protocol-specific masquerading support. Code, in the form of modules, can be loaded into the running kernel to provide masquerading for the less well-behaved protocols. These modules are automatically built when you select IP: masquerading during kernel configuration—all you have to do is load them. Pretty spiffy, eh? The list of modules and protocols supported includes, but is not limited to, the following:

• CUSeeMe with the module ip masq cuseeme.o

• FTP with the module ip masq ftp.o

• IRC with the module ip masq irc.o

• Quake with the module ip masq quake.o³

• RealAudio and RealVideo with the module ip masq raudio.o

• VDO Live with the module ip masq vdolive.o

To use one of the protocol modules, simply load it with insmod modulename. Because they need to be loaded to be useful, I add them to my /etc/init.d/network file so that they're loaded during the startup sequence. Although you may rarely need to use it, several of the modules support the ability to listen to more than just the well-known port for their respective protocol. This is useful if you want to provide FTP services on more ports than just port 21 by adding the argument to ports=x1,x2,x3… to the command line by using insmod to load the module. If you want to specify more than MAX MASQ APP PORTS different ports, you have to modify the value in /usr/src/linux/include/net/ip masq.h and recompile the kernel and the modules.