Suricata blocking IPs on passlist, legacy mode blocking both

[SteveITS]

@sgnoc I’d expect it’d be in the code right where it’s writing the log file. Imagining:

If (passlist log)
write log
Else
If (passlist wait)
sleep
End

Re checksum offload, I am pretty sure we’ve had that off per our setup doc from years ago because of false positives.

[sgnoc]

@SteveITS @btspce I've had some luck with my config now. I have disabled the checksum offloading (System->Advanced->Networking->Check "Disable checksum offloading") and adding an all encompassing subnet (10.10.0.0/16 vs all of /29 and /24 10.10.x.0 subnets) to a custom pass list. Last night I had multiple blocks on the interface that has been blocking my web server, and the web server address was not blocked this round.

I'm now putting the pass list back to default and letting it run today to see if it was a combination of the two changes or just the disable of checksum offloading. I thought I had already disabled it (I know I had at some point in the past), but can't remember if I enabled it for one reason or another sometime later, but it hasn't been modified in at least a year or two.

I found the hint on disabling checksum offloading on a previous topic from about 2020 where it was helping some posters with almost an identical issue as what we are seeing here, so definitely an issue that has occurred before if it is the same, and they found it in an even older post from back then. Seems to be something that only affects a portion of pfSense/Suricata users and only periodically. This doesn't fix it for everyone, but it's worth a try if you're setting is enabled (I know you said you have had yours off for years @SteveITS).

And while I was writing this, I had some additional alerts on my interface, after setting it back to the default pass list. It appears that just disabling hardware checksum offloading has done the trick for me. I'll continue watching the interfaces, but I think my issue may now be resolved.

Seems to be a result of the pfSense and Suricata updates and having hardware checksum offloading enabled that caused the instability. Again, I haven't modified the offloading settings in at least a year or two, so the updates changed something on my end that caused the compatibility issue on netgate hardware (running XG-7100-1U).

Hope this helps someone with similar circumstances! I'll post again if I notice anything more.

[btspce]

@sgnoc Great find! We are also running with hardware checksum offloading on the Netgate 6100 pair as the only thing enabled.
My understanding was that hardware checksum offloading only has to be disabled when running inline (and it has been working until now through all versions).
This could perhaps be a nic driver issue in the newer version of pfsense. Will Disable Hardware Checksum Offloading later today and report back.

[bmeeks]

Here is the pertinent information about the various hardware offloading options available for NICs and how each impacts Suricata:

https://docs.suricata.io/en/suricata-7.0.2/performance/packet-capture.html#offloading

It's best if all offload options for NIC hardware are set to "off". Legacy Blocking Mode in Suricata (and Snort) uses PCAP to for packet acquisition. Inline IPS Mode uses Netmap. Note in the link above that for both methods all hardware offloading options should be disabled.

[bmeeks]

@SteveITS said in Suricata blocking IPs on passlist, legacy mode blocking both:

@sgnoc I’d expect it’d be in the code right where it’s writing the log file. Imagining:

If (passlist log)
write log
Else
If (passlist wait)
sleep
End

Re checksum offload, I am pretty sure we’ve had that off per our setup doc from years ago because of false positives.

The Pass List debugging code is a per-thread thing. So, each worker thread does its own pass list debugging (when enabled). The file I/O is handled by built-in Suricata logging routines (the same ones that write the block.log and alerts.log files).

The amount of "wait time" is variable in the real case. Choosing a fixed interval would arbitrarily slow down all the packet processing threads.

[SteveITS]

@bmeeks said in Suricata blocking IPs on passlist, legacy mode blocking both:

best if all offload options for NIC hardware are set to "off"

Thinking out loud again, is it possible for Suricata/Snort to check that config setting and show a warning?

@bmeeks said in Suricata blocking IPs on passlist, legacy mode blocking both:

Choosing a fixed interval would arbitrarily slow down all the packet processing threads

Yes but I was just trying to think of a way to show what about "extra logging" could affect packet processing. It wasn't meant to be a fix.

[bmeeks]

@SteveITS said in Suricata blocking IPs on passlist, legacy mode blocking both:

Thinking out loud again, is it possible for Suricata/Snort to check that config setting and show a warning?

Both packages already do that for Inline IPS Mode, so it could be extended to cover all modes. I will add that to my future TODO list.

[sgnoc]

Just wanted to update, still running strong on my noisier interface with alerts only blocking external IPs. I haven't had another interface alert yet to confirm they are functioning properly, but I am hopeful this was the trick to get everything back on track. I'm curious to see if it works for @btspce once tested. I'll confirm my end for sure once other interfaces alert and operate as expected.

A warning alerting the setting as a conflict would be a nice addition. I remember having read that as an issue in the past for inline, but honestly I thought I had it disabled as it was. I don't get into that setting screen on the GUI very often, so a warning would be a welcomed addition. Although I'm not likely to ever toggle it again at this point. It will stay disabled along with the other offloading settings.

[btspce]

@sgnoc @bmeeks Now testing with hardware checksum offloading off.
Disabled hardware checksum offloading on backup firewall and rebooted.
Enabled suricata on interfaces again from primary firewall.
Suricata started on backup firewall without any issues.
Disabled hardware checksum offloading on primary firewall and rebooted.
wan vip plus other vip and ip adresses on wan was instantly blocked by suricata on secondary firewall during failover due to reboot of primary firewall. (It blocked wan vip, primary fw wan ip among other things)

Result: Primary firewall came back as master on all interfaces and secondary firewall was master on wan and backup on the other interfaces. Removed wan vip blocks on secondary firewall and traffic started to flow. Carp status went back to master/backup as it should when the block was removed.

So random adresses still has a chance to be blocked during failover in this newer version of pfsense and suricata. @bmeeks explained the timing issue well and it seems to hit us with enough traffic on wan.
The solution will probably be to switch to inline when using carp/ha to avoid this as we have never seen this timing issue on the older versions. Last working version was pfsense 23.05.1 and suricata 6.

We had around 300Mbit of incoming traffic on wan during failover above.
No interface flapping in suricata.log and everything works for 1 hour now but failover will be an issue it seems if enough traffic is hammering the interface during failover.

[bmeeks]

@btspce:
I believe there are CARP configuration changes with respect to timeouts that might help your issue. Essentially you would want to lengthen the time CARP allows the "leader" to appear in an offline state before switching roles.

I can certainly see how CARP changing who is primary and who is secondary would cause the Suricata "flapping issue". And the resulting IP deletions and additions result in the timing windows that allow blocks to happen when you don't want them.

Perhaps one future solution is "sleeping" the interface monitoring thread in Suricata for some period of time before it begins changing out IP addresses in the Radix Tree. But then you could create a window where something like a VPN interface is brought up by the kernel AFTER Suricata had started and manually scanned the interface IPs. The VPN IP might not be in the Radix Tree at that point (because it was not present at Suricata startup) and get blocked much like what is happening with your WAN IP now. You might simply fix one issue and simultaneously create another one for other users.

In short, there is no easy solution on the Suricata side. The better way to address this would be stretch out the CARP deadtime so that Suricata has a chance to get up and running on the interfaces BEFORE the CARP daemon decides the primary is down and switches to a secondary.

[bmeeks]

@btspce said in Suricata blocking IPs on passlist, legacy mode blocking both:

Now testing with hardware checksum offloading off.
Disabled hardware checksum offloading on backup firewall and rebooted.

While @sgnoc says disabling checksum offloading worked for him, I don't see how it can actually impact what's happening. The checksum offloading results in Suricata (or anything monitoring on the kernel end of the network connection) seeing invalid packet checksums. It does not alter what IP addresses are or are not in the packets and how they would be found (or not found) in a Radix Tree search. I also don't see how it could cause an IP to be deleted from and then later added back to an interface.

I guess it is possible the checksum offloading is causing something funky to happen at the NIC hardware level. If that is the case, then the actual NIC driver might be cycling the interface down and back up, and something like that would cause IP addresses to be deleted and added back as the interface was cycled. But you would expect that behavior to be noted in the pfSense system log.

[btspce]

@bmeeks I thought of that earlier and as a test raised the Base Advertising Frequency from 1 to 10 on wan only but it didn't help there. But that was with hardware checksum offloading enabled. So I will probably have to redo that test and maybe with an even higher base number to rule that out. But I think the next step will be to move this suricata instance from wan to an internal interface and switching to inline and see if it runs stable on these Netgate 6100.

I'm not sure disabling hardware checksum offloading did anything in our case either.
Perhaps the combination of running ET Pro rules (longer rule loading time), amount of traffic at the time of suricata starting and carp/ha makes this setup more likely to hit the issue.

[bmeeks]

@btspce said in Suricata blocking IPs on passlist, legacy mode blocking both:

@bmeeks I thought of that earlier and as a test raised the Base Advertising Frequency from 1 to 10 on wan only but it didn't help there. But that was with hardware checksum offloading enabled. So I will probably have to redo that test and maybe with an even higher base number to rule that out. But I think the next step will be to move this suricata instance from wan to an internal interface and switching to inline and see if it runs stable on these Netgate 6100.

I'm not sure disabling hardware checksum offloading did anything in our case either.
Perhaps the combination of running ET Pro rules (longer rule loading time), amount of traffic at the time of suricata starting and carp/ha makes this setup more likely to hit the issue.

I agree that the presence of CARP/HA is likely the cause of this problem. As I mentioned before, it's not a configuration I've ever tested with Suricata (nor Snort, for that matter). And the more traffic flowing over the interface, the more likely it is that a packet will trigger an alert while one of the interface IPs has been deleted from the Radix Tree (and before it gets added back to the tree).

So, do you not run HA on the internal interfaces? I would think that wherever CARP/HA is in place (WAN, LAN, or elsewhere) that the interface flapping would happen.

While Inline IPS Mode will eliminate permanent blocks of an interface IP, it can still result in traffic interruptions if a DROP rule triggers. But those interruptions should not impact packets associated with the CARP protocol unless a rule false positives on the traffic.

Also be aware that Inline IPS Mode is not available for all NIC types, but it should be available and work for the NICs in the SG-6100 box.

[btspce]

@bmeeks We do run HA on internal interfaces aswell. Moving the suricata instance from wan to one of the internal interfaces is simply to limit the traffic it sees when switching to inline as the load will increase. But it's not perfect either because now we have to rearrange or bypass some of the internal traffic which do not need to be scanned by suricata to limit the throughput drop on that side. I will probably do the switch this weekend if possible and report back.

We did use inline mode a few years ago on XG-7100 but it wasn't stable enough and legacy mode solved all issues at the time. But there has been a lot of development since then.

[bmeeks]

@btspce said in Suricata blocking IPs on passlist, legacy mode blocking both:

We did use inline mode a few years ago on XG-7100 but it wasn't stable enough and legacy mode solved all issues at the time. But there has been a lot of development since then.

Yes, a lot of work has gone into the netmap device driver over the last couple of years, especially in regards to mutliple host rings support in Suricata.

You will almost certainly want to change the Suricata Run Mode from AutoFP to workers on the INTERFACE SETTINGS tab in the Performance section. That will usually work much better with netmap on multi-core CPUs if you also have multi-queue NICs. But experiment with both modes. For a small handful of users AutoFP has performed better. Depends a lot on the particular NIC.

[btspce]

@bmeeks I'm now up and running in inline mode on two internal interfaces and in workers mode. One of interfaces has vlans on it.
Hardware Checksum offload disabled and flow control disabled for the relevant parent interfaces.
Everything works so far except both firewalls becomes carp master for the vlan interfaces only. No alerts on the interfaces. Any idea on this issue ?

[btspce]

The issue is that vlan hardware tagging has to be disabled on the nic for suricata to be able to pass the vlan tags in inline mode.

In this case it was interface igc0 so I entered the below command in a shell on both firewalls and traffic and carp was instantly happy. Is there any way to set this as a system tunable ?

ifconfig igc0 -vlanhwtag

[btspce]

@stephenw10 Do you know if we can disable vlan hardware tagging on a nic through a system tunable or loader or is it something that can be added in the next release?
It is needed for suricata to work in inline mode on parent interface with vlan's. Vlan traffic will not work without it.

[kiokoman]

@btspce
you can use cron
@reboot ifconfig igc0 -rxcsum -txcsum -tso -lro -txcsum6 -vlanhwtag -vlanhwtso

there is no result after
sysctl -a | grep vlanhw
so i don't think it's possible via system tunable

[bmeeks]

@btspce said in Suricata blocking IPs on passlist, legacy mode blocking both:

The issue is that vlan hardware tagging has to be disabled on the nic for suricata to be able to pass the vlan tags in inline mode.

In this case it was interface igc0 so I entered the below command in a shell on both firewalls and traffic and carp was instantly happy. Is there any way to set this as a system tunable ?

ifconfig igc0 -vlanhwtag

Not as a system tunable, but sort of in concert with @kiokoman's suggestion, you can use the earlyshellcmd options to do this at bootup. I formerly did this to make DHCP work properly with my fiber-to-the-home connection as the ISP's device used VLAN 0 and previous pfSense versions would not see that tag unless you turned off hardware VLAN tags.

Here is a link describing the process: https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/development/boot-commands.html. You can install the Shellcmd package to make this an easy GUI task. You can configure early shell commands to execute shortly after the firewall boots to turn off (or on) any special NIC hardware features.

Be advised that Inline IPS Mode and VLANs are not exactly best friends, but they do work okay so long as the Suricata instance is running on the parent physical interface. The package now sort of does that behind the scenes when it detects the interface is a VLAN. It configures Suricata to run on the parent physical interface in promiscuous mode. This VLAN coexistence is due to a limitation within the netmap kernel device and not something Suricata has control over. The current workaround is to use the physical parent interface.