I must confess that I'm very new to Linux world, and there are concepts that seem very unfamiliar to me.

One thing I miss the most is a good yet simple application level firewall. As of now, with all this pervasive intrusive and permanent connectivity to the internet it is a must to know what exactly is your computer doing, why and with whom. A protocol analyzer is ok but too unfriendly and time consuming to "analyze" that is practically useless for home users.

I have discovered a lot of programs in Windows environments that should not connect to the internet but they do (and with my ZoneAlarm free firewall I can stop them).

With Gufw (and several others) you have to know which apps do you have already installed (and we know that this is almost impossible with this modern OS´s with billions of code-lines).

What I'm looking for is a firewall that monitors the NIC/WAN connection and detects any program/app or whatever trying to "talk" through it proactively, regardless the port trying to use (must of the apps I mentioned earlier try to connect using well know TCP ports: 80, 443, 8080). Does this exist? (If not, then how I know what is doing my computer for sure?)

Douane

Douane is a personal firewall that protects a user's privacy by allowing a user to control which applications can connect to the internet from their GNU/Linux computer.

Installation

Until now (2017/05/22) there isn't Ubuntu packages available. You must build it from source.

These installation instructions are based on information from the Douane Wiki and tested on Ubuntu 16.04.2 64-bit.

Open a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) to run the commands.

Preparation

Update your system:

sudo apt update

sudo apt full-upgrade

If you get a notification asking to restart your computer, then restart it.

Install the dependencies

sudo apt install git build-essential dkms libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-regex-dev libboost-signals-dev policykit-1 libdbus-c++-dev libdbus-1-dev liblog4cxx10-dev libssl-dev libgtkmm-3.0-dev python3 python3-gi python3-dbus

Create a directory for compilation

cd

mkdir Douane

cd Douane

Build the kernel module

git clone https://github.com/Douane/douane-dkms

cd douane-dkms

sudo make dkms

Check if the module was built and installed correctly:

lsmod | grep douane

You should see something like:

douane                 20480  0

Build the daemon

cd ~/Douane

git clone --recursive https://github.com/Douane/douane-daemon

cd douane-daemon

make

sudo make install

Build the dialog process

cd ~/Douane

git clone --recursive https://github.com/Douane/douane-dialog

cd douane-dialog

make

sudo make install

Start the dialog process:

/opt/douane/bin/douane-dialog &

Then check if it is running:

pgrep -a douane-dialog

You should see something like:

21621 /opt/douane/bin/douane-dialog

Build the configurator

cd ~/Douane

git clone https://github.com/Douane/douane-configurator

cd douane-configurator

sudo python3 setup.py install

Start the daemon and setup automatic starting

I had to insert the following text in the file /etc/init.d/douane in order to enable the automatic starting of the daemon:

### BEGIN INIT INFO

# Provides:          douane

# Required-Start:

# Required-Stop:

# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5

# Default-Stop:      0 1 6

# Short-Description: Douane firewall

### END INIT INFO

Open the file for edit:

sudo nano /etc/init.d/douane

Then paste the above text after the program description. Press Ctrl+O,Enter to save, then Ctrl+X to exit the editor.

This is the first 21 lines of the file after I inserted the text:

#!/bin/bash

#

# douane      This shell script takes care of starting and stopping

#             douane daemon (A modern firewall at application layer)

#

# Author: Guillaume Hain zedtux@zedroot.org

#

# description: douane is the daemon process of the Douane firewall application. 

# This firewall is limiting access to the internet on application bases.



### BEGIN INIT INFO

# Provides:          douane

# Required-Start:

# Required-Stop:

# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5

# Default-Stop:      0 1 6

# Short-Description: Douane firewall

### END INIT INFO



# Source function library.

. /lib/lsb/init-functions

Now you can set up the auto start and start the daemon:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

sudo systemctl enable douane

sudo systemctl start douane

Activate the filter and auto start the dialog

Start the configurator:

douane-configurator

Then make sure the switches Use Douane to filter my network traffic and Auto start Douane on boot are both turned on.

You can review the filtering rules in the Rules tab. Right clicking a rule you get an option to delete it.

Test

If everything is fine you should see the Douane window asking for permission when you open applications that uses network connections.

This is a really good question, but I hate questions like this because they are really hard to answer without coming off like saying security is not important.

So first, let me say that security is important, but that Linux handles it very differently then Windows does.

So lets tackle your question.

First there is not going to be a outgoing firewall that works in the same way as zone alarm. Linux simply doesn't have a large need for one. Many applications work in a client/server architecture even though you are using them on the same machine. Xorg is a great example. First you have a server (in this case the part that draws on the screen) and a client (gedit) gedit talks to the server about drawing it's buttons, placing it's text and so on. Even something as simple os a mouse has this same architecture (or could have). A program acts as a server listening for information and sending out data when it gets it, then a client "connects" to that "mouse server" and waits for information.

This is so prevalent in Linux that if you were to create a "firewall" that asked permission for every network connection then you probably wouldn't be able to configure it because it couldn't connect to it's own server.

This is all a very rough example, some of it is misleading because it is so high level. But it's still very true.

To protect us Linux users against this, we have a set of two very basic rules that do a very good "basic" job.

1st, no user except root can open any port below 1024. (again very high level). This means to even run an FTP server (on a standard port) you need to have root access. You as a user can usually open "high ports" (those above 1024). But see rule two.

2nd. no process can access any file that the user starting the process could not access. (again very high level) So if "coteyr" were to start an FTP server, then that FTP server at worse case (high level) would only have the exact same access as the user coteyr that started it.

Because of the combination of these two rules, a "software" that asks every time something tries to connect firewall just gets in the way, and there isn't a lot of demand for it.

That said you can always create an outbound firewall rule, and in many cases this is probably not a bad idea. Many services can be (and are by default) configured to use file based sockets (or memory based) and not network based sockets.

An Inbound firewall rule usually closes any odd gapes left over by rule 1 or 2.

My point is this. Security is important and I am not trying to say it's not, it's just here in Linux land we have different tools and goals. I would recommend that you look into Linux user and group permissions and then use a tool like gfw and IPTABLES to fill in any gaps.

There is a new project called OpenSnitch described at

https://www.cyberciti.biz/python-tutorials/opensnitch-the-little-snitch-application-like-firewall-tool-for-linux/

The project page is https://www.opensnitch.io/

At this point it is considered alpha software, and strangely it is written in Python, but at least it is a fresh attempt, whereas Douane is a very old program that (I think) is much harder to install.

Disclaimer: I have not personally tested either program, I was just trying to find if there are any other options and noticed that no one had mentioned OpenSnitch here yet.