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How To Protect SSH with Fail2Ban on Ubuntu 14.04

How To Protect SSH with Fail2Ban on Ubuntu 14.04
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Ubuntu 14.04

Introduction

While connecting to your server through SSH can be very secure, the SSH daemon itself is a service that must be exposed to the internet to function properly. This comes with some inherent risk and creates a vector of attack for would-be assailants.

Any service that is exposed to the network is a potential target in this way. If you pay attention to application logs for these services, you will often see repeated, systematic login attempts that represent brute force attacks by users and bots alike.

A service called fail2ban can mitigate this problem by creating rules that can automatically alter your iptables firewall configuration based on a predefined number of unsuccessful login attempts. This will allow your server to respond to illegitimate access attempts without intervention from you.

In this guide, we’ll cover how to install and use fail2ban on an Ubuntu 14.04 server.

Install Fail2Ban on Ubuntu 14.04

The installation process for this tool is simple because the Ubuntu packaging team maintains a package in the default repositories.

First, we need to update our local package index and then we can use apt to download and install the package:

  1. sudo apt-get update
  2. sudo apt-get install fail2ban

As you can see, the installation is trivial. We can now begin configuring the utility for our own use.

Configure Fail2Ban with your Service Settings

The fail2ban service keeps its configuration files in the /etc/fail2ban directory. There is a file with defaults called jail.conf.

Since this file can be modified by package upgrades, we should not edit this file in-place, but rather copy it so that we can make our changes safely. In order for these two files to operate together successfully, it is best to only include the settings you wish to override in the jail.local file. All default options will be taken from the jail.conf file.

Even though we should only include deviations from the default in the jail.local file, it is easier to create a jail.local file based on the existing jail.conf file. So we will copy over that file, with the contents commented out, as the basis for the jail.local file. You can do this by typing:

  1. awk '{ printf "# "; print; }' /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf | sudo tee /etc/fail2ban/jail.local

Once the file is copied, we can open the original jail.conf file to see how things are set up by default

  1. sudo nano /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf

In this file, there are a few settings you may wish to adjust. The settings located under the [DEFAULT] section will be applied to all services enabled for fail2ban that are not overridden in the service’s own section.

/etc/fail2ban/jail.conf
[DEFAULT]
. . .
ignoreip = 127.0.0.1/8
. . .

The ignoreip setting configures the source addresses that fail2ban ignores. By default, it is configured to not ban any traffic coming from the local machine. You could add additional addresses to ignore by adding a [DEFAULT] section with an ignoreip setting under it to the jail.local file. You can add additional addresses by appending them to the end of the directive, separated by a space.

/etc/fail2ban/jail.conf
[DEFAULT]
. . .
bantime = 600
. . .

The bantime parameter sets length of time that a client will be banned when they have failed to authenticate correctly. This is measured in seconds. By default, this is set to 600 seconds, or 10 minutes.

/etc/fail2ban/jail.conf
[DEFAULT]
. . .
findtime = 600
maxretry = 3
. . .

The next two parameters that you want to pay attention to are findtime and maxretry. These work together to establish the conditions under which a client is found to be an illegitimate user that should be banned.

The maxretry variable sets the number of tries a client has to authenticate within a window of time defined by findtime, before being banned. With the default settings, the fail2ban service will ban a client that unsuccessfully attempts to log in 3 times within a 10 minute window.

/etc/fail2ban/jail.conf
[DEFAULT]
. . .
destemail = root@localhost
sendername = Fail2Ban
mta = sendmail
. . .

You will want to evaluate the destemail, sendername, and mta settings if you wish to configure email alerts. The destemail parameter sets the email address that should receive ban messages. The sendername sets the value of the “From” field in the email. The mta parameter configures what mail service will be used to send mail. Again, add these to the jail.local file, under the [DEFAULT] header and set to the proper values if you wish to adjust them.

/etc/fail2ban/jail.conf
[DEFAULT]
. . .
action = $(action_)s
. . .

This parameter configures the action that fail2ban takes when it wants to institute a ban. The value action_ is defined in the file shortly before this parameter. The default action is to simply configure the firewall to reject traffic from the offending host until the ban time elapses.

If you would like to configure email alerts, add or uncomment the action item to the jail.local file and change its value from action_ to action_mw. If you want the email to include the relevant log lines, you can change it to action_mwl. Make sure you have the appropriate mail settings configured if you choose to use mail alerts.

Individual Jail Settings

Finally, we get to the portion of the configuration file that deals with individual services. These are specified by the section headers, like [ssh].

Each of these sections can be enabled by uncommenting the header in jail.local and changing the enabled line to be “true”:

/etc/fail2ban/jail.local
[jail_to_enable]
. . .
enabled = true
. . .

By default, the SSH service is enabled and all others are disabled.

These sections work by using the values set in the [DEFAULT] section as a basis and modifying them as needed. If you want to override any values, you can do so by adding the appropriate service’s section to jail.local and modifying its values.

Some other settings that are set here are the filter that will be used to decide whether a line in a log indicates a failed authentication and the logpath which tells fail2ban where the logs for that particular service are located.

The filter value is actually a reference to a file located in the /etc/fail2ban/filter.d directory, with its .conf extension removed. These files contain the regular expressions that determine whether a line in the log is a failed authentication attempt. We won’t be covering these files in-depth in this guide, because they are fairly complex and the predefined settings match appropriate lines well.

However, you can see what kind of filters are available by looking into that directory:

  1. ls /etc/fail2ban/filter.d

If you see a file that looks to be related to a service you are using, you should open it with a text editor. Most of the files are fairly well commented and you should be able to at least tell what type of condition the script was designed to guard against. Most of these filters have appropriate (disabled) sections in the jail.conf file that we can enable in the jail.local file if desired.

For instance, pretend that we are serving a website using Nginx and realize that a password-protected portion of our site is getting slammed with login attempts. We can tell fail2ban to use the nginx-http-auth.conf file to check for this condition within the /var/log/nginx/error.log file.

This is actually already set up in a section called [nginx-http-auth] in our /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf file. We would just need to uncomment the section in the jail.local file and flip the enabled parameter to protect our service:

/etc/fail2ban/jail.local
. . .
[nginx-http-auth]

enabled = true
. . .

If you enable this, you’ll want to restart your fail2ban service to make sure your rules are constructed correctly.

Putting It All Together

Now that you understand the basic idea behind fail2ban, let’s run through a basic setup.

We’re going to configure a auto-banning policy for SSH and Nginx, just as we described above. We want fail2ban to email us when an IP is banned.

First, let’s install all of the relevant software.

If you don’t already have it, you’ll need nginx, since we’re going to be monitoring its logs, and you’ll need sendmail to mail us notifications. We’ll also grab iptables-persistent to allow the server to automatically set up our firewall rules at boot. These can be acquired from Ubuntu’s default repositories:

  1. sudo apt-get update
  2. sudo apt-get install nginx sendmail iptables-persistent

Stop the fail2ban service for a moment so that we can establish a base firewall without the rules it adds:

  1. sudo service fail2ban stop

Establish a Base Firewall

When that is finished, we should implement a default firewall. You can learn how to configure an iptables firewall on Ubuntu 14.04 here. We are going to just create a basic firewall for this guide.

We’re going to tell it to allow established connections, traffic generated by the server itself, traffic destined for our SSH and web server ports. We will drop all other traffic. We can set this basic firewall up by typing:

  1. sudo iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
  2. sudo iptables -A INPUT -m conntrack --ctstate ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
  3. sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
  4. sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m multiport --dports 80,443 -j ACCEPT
  5. sudo iptables -A INPUT -j DROP

These commands will implement the above policy. We can see our current firewall rules by typing:

  1. sudo iptables -S
Output
-P INPUT ACCEPT -P FORWARD ACCEPT -P OUTPUT ACCEPT -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -m conntrack --ctstate RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -j DROP

You can save the firewalls so that they survive a reboot by typing:

  1. sudo dpkg-reconfigure iptables-persistent

Afterwards, you can restart fail2ban to implement the wrapping rules:

  1. sudo service fail2ban start

We can see our current firewall rules by typing:

  1. sudo iptables -S
Output
-P INPUT ACCEPT -P FORWARD ACCEPT -P OUTPUT ACCEPT -N fail2ban-ssh -A INPUT -p tcp -m multiport --dports 22 -j fail2ban-ssh -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -m conntrack --ctstate RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -j DROP -A fail2ban-ssh -j RETURN

We have our default policy for each of our chains, and then the five base rules that we established. In red, we also have the default structure set up by fail2ban since it already implements SSH banning policies by default. These may or may not show up at first, since sometimes fail2ban does not add the structure until the first ban is implemented.

Adjusting the Fail2ban Configuration

Now, we need to configure fail2ban using the settings we’d like. Open the jail.local file:

  1. sudo nano /etc/fail2ban/jail.local

We can set a more severe ban time here. Find and uncomment the [DEFAULT] heading. Under the default heading, change the bantime setting so that our service bans clients for half an hour:

/etc/fail2ban/jail.local
[DEFAULT]
. . .
bantime = 1800
. . .

We also need to configure our alert email information. First, find the destemail parameter, which should also be under the [DEFAULT] heading. Put in the email address that you want to use to collect these messages:

/etc/fail2ban/jail.local
[DEFAULT]
. . .
destemail = admin@example.com
. . .

You can set the sendername to something else if you’d like. It’s useful to have a value that can be easily filtered using your mail service though, or else your regular inbox may get flooded with alerts if there are a lot of break in attempts from various places.

Moving down, we need to adjust the action parameter to one of the actions that sends us email. The choices are between action_mw which institutes the ban and then emails us a “whois” report on the offending host, or action_mwl which does the above, but also emails the relevant log lines.

We’re going to choose action_mwl because the log lines will help us troubleshoot and gather more information if there are issues:

/etc/fail2ban/jail.local
[DEFAULT]
. . .
action = %(action_mwl)s
. . .

Moving on to our SSH section, if we want to adjust the amount of unsuccessful attempts that should be allowed before a ban is established, you can edit the maxretry entry. If you are using a port other than “22”, you’ll want to adjust the port parameter appropriately. As we said before, this service is already enabled, so we don’t need to modify that.

Next, search for the nginx-http-auth section. Uncomment the header and change the enabled parameter to read “true”.

/etc/fail2ban/jail.local
. . .
[nginx-http-auth]

enabled = true
. . .

This should be all you have to do this section unless your web server is operating on non-standard ports or if you moved the default error log path.

Restarting the Fail2ban Service

When you are finished, save and close the file.

Now, start or restart your fail2ban service. Sometimes, it’s better to completely shut down the service and then start it again:

  1. sudo service fail2ban stop

Now we can restart it by typing:

  1. sudo service fail2ban start

It may take a few moments for all of your firewall rules to be populated. Sometimes, the rules are not added until the first ban of that type is instituted. However, after a time, you can check the new rules by typing:

  1. sudo iptables -S
Output
-P INPUT ACCEPT -P FORWARD ACCEPT -P OUTPUT ACCEPT -N fail2ban-nginx-http-auth -N fail2ban-ssh -A INPUT -p tcp -m multiport --dports 80,443 -j fail2ban-nginx-http-auth -A INPUT -p tcp -m multiport --dports 22 -j fail2ban-ssh -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -m conntrack --ctstate RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -j DROP -A fail2ban-nginx-http-auth -j RETURN -A fail2ban-ssh -j RETURN

The lines in red are the ones that our fail2ban policies have created. Right now, they are just directing traffic to new, almost empty chains and then letting the traffic flow right back into the INPUT chain.

However, these new chains are where the banning rules will be added.

Testing the Banning Policies

From another server, one that won’t need to log into your fail2ban server with, we can test the rules by getting our second server banned.

After logging into your second server, try to SSH into the fail2ban server. You can try to connect using a non-existent name for instance:

  1. ssh blah@fail2ban_server_IP

Enter random characters into the password prompt. Repeat this a few times. At some point, the fail2ban server will stop responding with the Permission denied message. This signals that your second server has been banned from the fail2ban server.

On your fail2ban server, you can see the new rule by checking our iptables again:

  1. sudo iptables -S
Output
-P INPUT ACCEPT -P FORWARD ACCEPT -P OUTPUT ACCEPT -N fail2ban-nginx-http-auth -N fail2ban-ssh -A INPUT -p tcp -m multiport --dports 80,443 -j fail2ban-nginx-http-auth -A INPUT -p tcp -m multiport --dports 22 -j fail2ban-ssh -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -m conntrack --ctstate RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -j DROP -A fail2ban-nginx-http-auth -j RETURN -A fail2ban-ssh -s 203.0.113.14/32 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-port-unreachable -A fail2ban-ssh -j RETURN

As you can see in the highlighted line, we have a new rule in our configuration which rejects traffic to the SSH port coming from our second server’s IP address. You should have also gotten an email about the ban in the account you configured.

Conclusion

You should now be able to configure some basic banning policies for your services. Fail2ban is very easy to set up, and is a great way to protect any kind of service that uses authentication.

If you want to learn more about how fail2ban works, you can check out our tutorial on how fail2ban rules and files work.

For information about how to use fail2ban to protect other services, try these links:

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after upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04.1 fail2ban service will not start. Check this thread https://github.com/fail2ban/fail2ban/issues/1396

To summarize, Fail2ban member yarikoptic says https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-protect-ssh-with-fail2ban-on-centos-7 provides correct configuration, while this article does not.

It seems that the syntax of fail2ban has changed since version 0.9.0, so some of the tips in this tutorial are outdated.

Superb simple, detailed and straight forward doc like always

DigitalOcean docs are the best !!

Thanks for this article!

I wonder why are we editing jail.local file instead of jail.conf? We copied local file from conf file and it started to be main configuration file!

How does it work?

Justin Ellingwood
DigitalOcean Employee
DigitalOcean Employee badge
May 9, 2014

Hey brandon:

No, those lines will do different things. Hopefully I can explain why that is.

With your original configuration, a packet will be compared to each of the rules in your INPUT chain. At the end of your INPUT chain, you have a rule to drop any traffic that hasn’t matched so far. That’s why before that rule, you needed the original lines that explicitly allow generic traffic aimed at your web server and ssh daemon respectively. These will catch the web and ssh traffic and allow it to pass before it gets dropped.

The fail2ban rules that are added initially simply do one thing: at the very beginning of the INPUT chain, they will temporarily divert generic traffic aimed at those services to a new chain. These new chains are empty at the beginning except for one rule, which just hands control back to the INPUT chain, where it will continue on down the line, just like normal. These packets will still be dropped if they reach the end of the INPUT chain, just like they used to, so your original rules for the web server and ssh daemon are still necessary.

When a client is banned for failing to authenticate, fail2ban adds a new rule to the new fail2ban-* chain. The new rule checks whether the traffic is coming from the banned host. If it matches, the packets are dropped. If the traffic doesn’t match, it reaches the rule that returns the packet to the INPUT chain where it continues as described above.

So all that the initial fail2ban lines do is create an extra loop where additional checks can be made to deny specific clients. The flow is always returned to the main INPUT chain for traffic not matching a banned client. It doesn’t make any decision on the fate of the packet if it doesn’t match the ban list. That is left to the rules in your INPUT chain. The key rule to understand here is the -j RETURN rule at the bottom of the new chains, which tell the packet to continue where it left off in the original INPUT chain.

Justin Ellingwood
DigitalOcean Employee
DigitalOcean Employee badge
May 9, 2014

Hi brandon:

Looking at your configuration, I would say that fail2ban is still going to be useful for you. Your first configuration that you posted above drops connection attempts that are not directed to port 80, 443, or 22 (as well as allowing local connections).

However, the point of fail2ban is to ban people who repeatedly fail to authenticate. This means that if someone is attempting to log into SSH, they will be banned after a few attempts, causing them to move on. This rule would be added to the fail2ban-ssh chain prior to the -A fail2ban-ssh -j RETURN rule.

While this might not seem like a big deal considering that you have already disabled password logins through the sshd config file, it will help keep your logs clean. This can be incredibly useful when you are trying to analyze your logs in case of a problem by cutting down on the background noise.

Also, with the Nginx, the Auth_Basic module that provides authentication doesn’t have the functionality to limit attempts. If you have sections of your site protected by password authentication, you probably will benefit from a service like fail2ban limiting the number of authentication attempts.

In general though, this is up to you and if you feel that fail2ban is not providing value, you do not have to use it. However, in my testing, it doesn’t use many resources, so it may be worth it to keep it around just as an extra level of protection.

Just an FYI when I set this up Fail2Ban v 0.9.3-1 on Ubuntu 16.04.05 my iptables rules show up as f2b not fail2ban as in the tutorial above:

-N f2b-sshd
-A INPUT -p tcp -m multiport --dports 22 -j f2b-sshd
-A f2b-sshd -j RETURN

fail2ban is an okay tool for blacklisting IPs but when I’ve used it, I’ve never turned on e-mail notifications. My inbox would get flooded with useless messages (and might overwhelm the server if it is seriously attacked). For real security, closing off SSH entirely is the best option. If no traffic can get to port 22 in the first place, then nothing bad can happen - well, at least via that service. While SSH keys + fail2ban go a long way to securing SSH from brute force attacks, they won’t necessarily stop a security vulnerability in sshd itself from being exploited.

I currently run Web Knocker Firewall Service. It’s a system service that uses encrypted data packets to temporarily whitelist whatever my current IP address is for specific ports via the web server running on the same system. I’ve been running it for several years now without any issues and it prevents China, North Korea, and Russia bots that probe the edges of my network from knowing port 22 is even there whereas with fail2ban my logs were full of attempts to gain access to my systems. Web Knocker Firewall Service is a bit tricky to set up but my IP address changes frequently and I don’t have to worry about losing access and having to manually update firewall rules since it closes off port 22 and a couple of other ports to everyone else but me.

VPN isolation is another option. But VPN just opens other ports to the Internet that are an even juicier target for attackers because a lot of sysadmins assume that anyone who managed to get onto VPN is automatically okay. Two-factor auth can be set up with VPN, but that just travels down the rabbit hole pretty quickly. A VPN can also be difficult to set up depending on the network configuration.

As of June 2018, the new DigitalOcean Firewall API might be the best option to date. Droplets can be assigned to a tag and the tag can be assigned to a firewall. Then as the IP address changes, a script can be running that automatically adjusts the firewall rules via the API. All Droplets associated to the tag are updated with the latest rule changes granting access to port 22 to just authorized users.

I don’t know of a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of leaving port 22 open. People have differing opinions on the topic. However, no one disputes that port 22 grants remote access to sensitive system components and also that fewer open ports facing the big bad Internet helps to harden a system. “Defense-in-depth” is a frequent phrase I see and so a combination of technologies - some of which many not even exist yet - may be the answer.

Does this work with UFW because this also uses iptables.

Hi !

I was wondering if there is a way to ban an IP adress permanently (and not only during a bantime) maybe by addind the IP to the hosts.deny file ?

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