Firewall management is the process of configuring and monitoring a firewall in order to keep a network secure. Firewalls are essential for protecting private networks in both personal and commercial settings.
AWS Firewall Manager is a security management service that enables you to centrally configure and manage firewall rules across your AWS Organizations accounts and applications.
As new applications are developed, Firewall Manager makes it simple to bring them into compliance by enforcing a common set of security rules.
Topics We” ll Cover:
What is AWS Firewall Manager?
It is a central management service for the security of your Amazon services, where a firewall manager makes it easy to set some common security rules on your newly created application, which ensures some security for your application; you can also change these rules according to your requirements and put the new policy to access your services for all the applications or particular application in a hierarchical manner across your entire infrastructure.
You can quickly deploy AWS WAF rules for your Application Load Balancers, API Gateways, and Amazon CloudFront deployments using AWS Firewall Manager. You can set up AWS Shield Advanced protection for your Application Load Balancers, ELB Classic Load Balancers, Elastic IP Addresses, and CloudFront distributions.
AWS Firewall Manager Pre-requisites
Step 1: Become a member of the Amazon Web Services Organizations –
The user account must be part of the AWS organisation in order to use the Firewall Manager. Step 2 can be performed immediately if the user’s account is already a member. Create the organisation with the user account as a master account if the user account is not a member. Add other accounts to the organisation and enable the features after it is created.
Step 2: Set up the AWS Firewall Manager Administrator account –
The master account of the organisation you’ve created must be linked to the firewall managers. The account is then referred to as the AWS Firewall Manager Administrator Account.
- Log in to the AWS console with the AWS organization’s master account. If any other account has the necessary permissions, it can also be used to log in.
- Launch the Firewall Manager console.
- Choose “Get started”.
- Enter the Account ID that needs to be associated with the Firewall Manager.
- The Firewall Manager Administrator account will be created after that.
- Choose “Set administrator”.
Step 3: AWS Config should be enabled –
Each account in the AWS organisation must have an AWS Config account enabled. The configuration can be enabled manually or with the help of templates. You must also specify the resources that the firewall must protect.
Benefits of AWS Firewall Manager
1. Manage firewall rules across all of your accounts with ease:
- It is integrated with AWS Organizations so that you can manage your Amazon VPC‘s AWS WAF rules, AWS Shield Advanced protection, security groups, AWS Network Firewall rules, and Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall rules all from one place.
- You can aggregate rules, create policies, and apply those policies across your entire infrastructure from a central location. For example, you can delegate the creation of account-specific rules while maintaining global security standards across all accounts.
2. Ensure that existing and new applications comply:
- It automatically applies the mandatory security policies you define across existing and newly created resources. The service discovers new resources as they are created across accounts. You can use Firewall Manager to deploy an AWS WAF rule to your Application Load Balancer to block traffic from embargoed countries.
- If you need to comply with the US Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) regulations, you can use API Gateway and Amazon CloudFront accounts. When new resources are created, they are automatically added to the policy’s scope.
3. Managed rules can be easily applied to multiple accounts:
- It interfaces with Managed Rules for AWS WAF, making it simple to install pre-configured WAF rules on your apps. You can select a Managed Rule from an AWS Marketplace Seller and deploy it uniformly across your Application Load Balancer, API Gateway, and Amazon CloudFront architecture with just a few clicks in the interface.
- For example, you can easily protect your entire business from zero-day vulnerabilities by subscribing to a Managed Rule for WAF from the AWS Marketplace that includes CVE patch updates. Using Advanced Shield protections, you can use Firewall Manager to automatically protect multiple accounts from DDoS attacks such as UDP reflection, SYN flood, DNS query flood, and HTTP flood attacks.
4. Centrally deploy VPC protections:
- For EC2 instances, Application Load Balancers (ALBs), and Elastic Network Interfaces, your security administrator can use Firewall Manager to create a baseline set of VPC security group rules in your Amazon VPCs (ENIs). At the same time, you can use a single location to audit and fix any existing security groups in your VPCs that have too permissive policies.
- You can use Firewall Manager to deploy rules for AWS Network Firewalls across your VPCs in your business to restrict traffic leaving and entering your network. Using Firewall Manager, you can also link your VPCs to Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall rules, which will block DNS queries for known malicious domains while allowing queries for trusted domains.
Getting Started with AWS Firewall Manager
This section will look at how to use it to manage AWS WAF and Security Group policies centrally.
1. AWS WAF: AWS WAF is a managed web application firewall that can track HTTP/S requests to AWS public endpoints. These endpoints have WAF rules that can block or allow requests based on specific conditions or known attacks like SQL injection. The burden of managing multiple WAF rules for different services can be greatly reduced with Firewall Manager. Instead of attaching WAF rules to each resource individually, Firewall Manager policies can be created to attach WAF rules to specific resources based on various conditions.
Creating a Firewall Manager policy for AWS WAF is very similar to creating a WAF rule:
- Click Create policy under Security Policies, then select AWS WAF
- Choose a region. To secure a CloudFront Distribution, use Global.
- Give the policy a name that is simple to remember.
- Choose the rule groups to be evaluated by WAF and the default action.
- Choose the accounts or organisational units to which this policy will apply.
- Select the types of resources to safeguard, the tags to look for, and the tags to apply to the policy.
2. Security Groups: Security Groups are stateful managed firewalls that can be attached to specific resources such as EC2 instances. It can simplify and automate the process of determining which security groups to apply to specific instances. For example, a policy stating that all instances with the tag “Application 1” within “Organizational Unit 1” will have the “Application 1” policy applied. This means that all EC2 instances with that tag in that organisational unit will be assigned the same security group, and as an added bonus, the Firewall Manager will continuously monitor compliance with this policy.
- Click Create policy under Security Policies, then select Security Group.
- Select Common security groups as the policy type and the region for this policy.
- Give the policy a name that is simple to remember.
- Create a new security group to use in the desired region under Add primary security group. Include this security group in the policy.
- Choose Apply policy rules and identify non-compliant resources but do not auto remediate for the Policy action, so the Firewall Manager monitors the rule’s compliance without changing it.
Features of AWS Firewall Manager
- It integrates with AWS Organizations, allowing you to protect resources across accounts.
- You can hierarchically apply protection policies with Firewall Manager, allowing you to delegate the creation of application-specific rules while still having the ability to enforce certain rules centrally.
- It lets you apply WAF rules to a group of resources and Managed Rules for AWS WAF.
- A rule group is a collection of rules that you can add to an AWS Firewall Manager policy or a web ACL. You can either create your own rule group or buy a managed rule group from the AWS Marketplace.
- It comes with pre-configured rules for auditing VPC security groups and generating detailed non-compliance reports.
Pricing
1. It is included at no extra cost for Shield Advanced customers. Shield Advanced customers will be charged for any AWS Config rules that are created to monitor changes in resource configurations.
2. It has the following main pricing components for WAF and Shield Standard customers:
- Protection policy for Firewall Manager – Monthly fee per Region.
- AWS Web Application Firewall WebACLs or Rules – Those generated by the Firewall Manager will be charged at the current rate.
- Config Rules for AWS – Firewall Manager-created rules that monitor changes in resource configurations are charged based on current pricing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. What does AWS Firewall Manager do?
Ans. It allows you to configure AWS WAF rules, AWS Shield Advanced safeguards, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) security groups, AWS Network Firewalls, and Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall rules across all of your accounts and resources.
Q2. Is it possible for me to design regional protection policies?
Ans. No, the protection policies in it are region-specific. Only resources available in that AWS Region can be included in a Firewall Manager policy. For each region in which you operate, you can develop a new policy.
Q3. When a resource is non-compliant, does it send a notification?
Ans. Yes, you can set up new SNS notification channels to get real-time alerts when new non-compliant resources are detected. Non-compliant events on AWS Security Hub are also informed to each account scoped as part of a Firewall Manager policy.
Q4. What is the maximum number of accounts that AWS Firewall Manager can manage?
Ans. Each Firewall Manager policy can contain a maximum of 2,500 accounts, which is the AWS Organizations’ default limit for account numbers.
Related Links/References
- AWS Free Tier Limits
- AWS Free Tier Account Details
- How to create a free tier account in AWS
- AWS Free Tier Account Services
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