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Implementing A Basic Stateful Firewall

Introduction

The objective of this exercise is to write a P4 program that implements a simple stateful firewall. To do this, we will use a bloom filter. This exercise builds upon the basic exercise so be sure to complete that one before trying this one.

We will use the pod-topology for this exercise, which consists of four hosts connected to four switches, which are wired up as they would be in a single pod of a fat tree topology.

topology

Switch s1 will be configured with a P4 program that implements a simple stateful firewall (firewall.p4), the rest of the switches will run the basic IPv4 router program (basic.p4) from the previous exercise.

The firewall on s1 should have the following functionality:

  • Hosts h1 and h2 are on the internal network and can always connect to one another.
  • Hosts h1 and h2 can freely connect to h3 and h4 on the external network.
  • Hosts h3 and h4 can only reply to connections once they have been established from either h1 or h2, but cannot initiate new connections to hosts on the internal network.

Note: This stateful firewall is implemented 100% in the dataplane using a simple bloom filter. Thus there is some probability of hash collisions that would let unwanted flows to pass through.

Our P4 program will be written for the V1Model architecture implemented on P4.org's bmv2 software switch. The architecture file for the V1Model can be found at: /usr/local/share/p4c/p4include/v1model.p4. This file desribes the interfaces of the P4 programmable elements in the architecture, the supported externs, as well as the architecture's standard metadata fields. We encourage you to take a look at it.

Spoiler alert: There is a reference solution in the solution sub-directory. Feel free to compare your implementation to the reference.

Step 1: Run the (incomplete) starter code

The directory with this README also contains a skeleton P4 program, firewall.p4. Your job will be to extend this skeleton program to properly implement the firewall.

Before that, let's compile the incomplete firewall.p4 and bring up a switch in Mininet to test its behavior.

  1. In your shell, run:

    make run

    This will:

    • compile firewall.p4, and
    • start the pod-topo in Mininet and configure all switches with the appropriate P4 program + table entries, and
    • configure all hosts with the commands listed in pod-topo/topology.json

  2. You should now see a Mininet command prompt. Try to run some iperf TCP flows between the hosts. TCP flows within the internal network should work:

    mininet> iperf h1 h2

    TCP flows from hosts in the internal network to the outside hosts should also work:

    mininet> iperf h1 h3

    TCP flows from the outside hosts to hosts inside the internal network should NOT work. However, since the firewall is not implemented yet, the following should work:

    mininet> iperf h3 h1

  3. Type exit to leave the Mininet command line. Then, to stop mininet:

    make stop

    And to delete all pcaps, build files, and logs:

    make clean

A note about the control plane

A P4 program defines a packet-processing pipeline, but the rules within each table are inserted by the control plane. When a rule matches a packet, its action is invoked with parameters supplied by the control plane as part of the rule.

In this exercise, we have already implemented the the control plane logic for you. As part of bringing up the Mininet instance, the make command will install packet-processing rules in the tables of each switch. These are defined in the sX-runtime.json files, where X corresponds to the switch number.

Important: We use P4Runtime to install the control plane rules. The content of files sX-runtime.json refer to specific names of tables, keys, and actions, as defined in the P4Info file produced by the compiler (look for the file build/firewall.p4.p4info.txt after executing make run). Any changes in the P4 program that add or rename tables, keys, or actions will need to be reflected in these sX-runtime.json files.

Step 2: Implement Firewall

The firewall.p4 file contains a skeleton P4 program with key pieces of logic replaced by TODO comments. Your implementation should follow the structure given in this file --- replace each TODO with logic implementing the missing piece.

High-level Approach: We will use a bloom filter with two hash functions to check if a packet coming into the internal network is a part of an already established TCP connection. We will use two different register arrays for the bloom filter, each to be updated by a hash function. Using different register arrays makes our design amenable to high-speed P4 targets that typically allow only one access to a register array per packet.

A complete firewall.p4 will contain the following components:

  1. Header type definitions for Ethernet (ethernet_t), IPv4 (ipv4_t) and TCP (tcp_t).
  2. Parsers for Ethernet, IPv4 and TCP that populate ethernet_t, ipv4_t and tcp_t fields.
  3. An action to drop a packet, using mark_to_drop().
  4. An action (called compute_hashes) to compute the bloom filter's two hashes using hash algorithms crc16 and crc32. The hashes will be computed on the packet 5-tuple consisting of IPv4 source and destination addresses, source and destination port numbers and the IPv4 protocol type.
  5. An action (ipv4_forward) and a table (ipv4_lpm) that will perform basic IPv4 forwarding (adopted from basic.p4).
  6. An action (called set_direction) that will simply set a one-bit direction variable as per the action's parameter.
  7. A table (called check_ports) that will read the ingress and egress port of a packet (after IPv4 forwarding) and invoke set_direction. The direction will be set to 1, if the packet is incoming into the internal network. Otherwise, the direction will be set to 0. To achieve this, the file pod-topo/s1-runtime.json contains the appropriate control plane entries for the check_ports table.
  8. A control that will:
    1. First apply the table ipv4_lpm if the packet has a valid IPv4 header.
    2. Then if the TCP header is valid, apply the check_ports table to determine the direction.
    3. Apply the compute_hashes action to compute the two hash values which are the bit positions in the two register arrays of the bloom filter (reg_pos_one and reg_pos_two). When the direction is 1 i.e. the packet is incoming into the internal network, compute_hashes will be invoked by swapping the source and destination IPv4 addresses and the source and destination ports. This is to check against bloom filter's set bits when the TCP connection was initially made from the internal network.
    4. TODO: If the TCP packet is going out of the internal network and is a SYN packet, set both the bloom filter arrays at the computed bit positions (reg_pos_one and reg_pos_two). Else, if the TCP packet is entering the internal network, read both the bloom filter arrays at the computed bit positions and drop the packet if either is not set.
  9. A deparser that emits the Ethernet, IPv4 and TCP headers in the right order.
  10. A package instantiation supplied with the parser, control, and deparser.

    In general, a package also requires instances of checksum verification and recomputation controls. These are not necessary for this tutorial and are replaced with instantiations of empty controls.

Step 3: Run your solution

Follow the instructions from Step 1. This time, the iperf flow between h3 and h1 should be blocked by the firewall.

Food for thought

You may have noticed that in this simple stateful firewall, we are adding new TCP connections to the bloom filter (based on outgoing SYN packets). However, we are not removing them in case of TCP connection teardown (FIN packets). How would you implement the removal of TCP connections that are no longer active?

Things to consider:

  • Can we simply set the bloom filter array bits to 0 on receiving a FIN packet? What happens when there is one hash collision in the bloom filter arrays between two active TCP connections?
  • How can we modify our bloom filter structure so that the deletion operation can be properly supported?

Troubleshooting

There are several problems that might manifest as you develop your program:

  1. firewall.p4 might fail to compile. In this case, make run will report the error emitted from the compiler and halt.

  2. firewall.p4 might compile but fail to support the control plane rules in the s1-runtime.json file that make run tries to install using P4Runtime. In this case, make run will report errors if control plane rules cannot be installed. Use these error messages to fix your firewall.p4 implementation.

  3. firewall.p4 might compile, and the control plane rules might be installed, but the switch might not process packets in the desired way. The logs/sX.log files contain detailed logs that describe how each switch processes each packet. The output is detailed and can help pinpoint logic errors in your implementation.

Cleaning up Mininet

In the latter two cases above, make run may leave a Mininet instance running in the background. Use the following command to clean up these instances:

make stop

Relevant Documentation

The documentation for P4_16 and P4Runtime is available here

All excercises in this repository use the v1model architecture, the documentation for which is available at:

  1. The BMv2 Simple Switch target document accessible here talks mainly about the v1model architecture.
  2. The include file v1model.p4 has extensive comments and can be accessed here.