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Full Discussion: iptables latency evaluation
Special Forums Cybersecurity iptables latency evaluation Post 302568808 by Slaughterman on Friday 28th of October 2011 09:32:44 AM
Old 10-28-2011
iptables latency evaluation

Hello guys,

I'm actually working on my master thesis which has for subject the evaluation of virtual firewall in a cloud environment. To do so, I installed my own cloud using OpenNebula (as a frontend) and Xen (as a Node) on two different machines. The Xen machine is my virtual firewall thanks to iptables.

I am running a number of different performance tests over the xen machine to evaluate the performance of iptables. One of this test, would be the latency time introduced by the processing of the packet in iptables; and this is where I'm having troubles testing it.

Here are the different ideas I had so far, and their problems:
- ICMP Timestamp pinging. An ICMP Timestamp reply contains three timestamps: originate timestamp which is the time the sender last touched the message, receive timestamp which is the time the receiver first touched the message, and transmit timestamp which is the time the receiver last touched the message before sending it back. By subtracting the transmit timestamp by the receive timestamp, we get the processing latency of the packet. The problem is the time is in milliseconds which is no precise enough as the latency (at least when a very little number of rules are active in iptables) is lower than 1ms.
- Normal ping ran two times with the firewall on, and then off. The process time is the subtraction between this two times, divided buy 2 (because of round-trip latency) A little more precise has it is in microsecond, but still not enough (nanoseconds would be good). And I fear all this calculation adds too much approximation anyway...
- Wireshark timestamp calculation: sucks totally as wireshark capture the packets before they enter iptables
- Normal ping one time. Displaying the latency as round-trip latency. I won't get the processing latency, but I will still be able to display in a graph the effect of rules and throughput level on the overall latency of a connection going through the firewall. That's my "best" plan so far, but it sucks because it's off the original idea which is measuring the firewall latency only.

Do you guys have any comments on my ideas, or even better a solution to accurately measure firewall latency ?

Cheers,

Clement
 

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PYROMAN(8)						      System Manager's Manual							PYROMAN(8)

NAME
pyroman - a firewall configuration utility SYNOPSIS
pyroman [ -hvnspP ] [ -r RULESDIR ] [ -t SECONDS ] [ --help ] [ --version ] [ --safe ] [ --no-act ] [ --print ] [ --print-verbose ] [ --rules=RULESDIR ] [ --timeout=SECONDS ] [ safe ] DESCRIPTION
pyroman is a firewall configuration utility. It will compile a set of configuration files to iptables statements to setup IP packet filtering for you. While it is not necessary for operating and using Pyroman, you should have understood how IP, TCP, UDP, ICMP and the other commonly used Internet protocols work and interact. You should also have understood the basics of iptables in order to make use of the full functionality. pyroman does not try to hide all the iptables complexity from you, but tries to provide you with a convenient way of managing a complex networks firewall. For this it offers a compact syntax to add new firewall rules, while still exposing access to add arbitrary iptables rules. OPTIONS
-r RULESDIR,--rules=RULES Load the rules from directory RULESDIR instead of the default directory (usually /etc/pyroman ) -t SECONDS,--timeout=SECONDS Wait SECONDS seconds after applying the changes for the user to type OK to confirm he can still access the firewall. This implies --safe but allows you to use a different timeout. -h, --help Print a summary of the command line options and exit. -V, --version Print the version number of pyroman and exit. -s, --safe, safe When the firewall was committed, wait 30 seconds for the user to type OK to confirm, that he can still access the firewall (i.e. the network connection wasn't blocked by the firewall). Otherwise, the firewall changes will be undone, and the firewall will be restored to the previous state. Use the --timeout=SECONDS option to change the timeout. -n, --no-act Don't actually run iptables. This can be used to check if pyroman accepts the configuration files. -p, --print Instead of running iptables, output the generated rules. -P, --print-verbose Instead of running iptables, output the generated rules. Each statement will have one comment line explaining how this rules was generated. This will usually include the filename and line number, and is useful for debugging. CONFIGURATION
Configuration of pyroman consists of a number of files in the directory /etc/pyroman. These files are in python syntax, although you do not need to be a python programmer to use these rules. There is only a small number of statements you need to know: add_host Define a new host or network add_interface Define a new interface (group) add_service Add a new service alias (note that you can always use e.g. www/tcp to reference the www tcp service as defined in /etc/services) add_nat Define a new NAT (Network Address Translation) rule allow Allow a service, client, server combination reject Reject access for this service, client, server combination drop Drop packets for this service, client, server combination add_rule Add a rule for this service, client, server and target combination iptables Add an arbitrary iptables statement to be executed at beginning iptables_end Add an arbitrary iptables statement to be executed at the end Detailed parameters for these functions can be looked up by caling cd /usr/share/pyroman pydoc ./commands.py BUGS
None known as of pyroman-0.4 release AUTHOR
pyroman was written by Erich Schubert <erich@debian.org> SEE ALSO
iptables(8), iptables-restore(8) iptables-load(8) PYROMAN(8)
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