The Cisco ASA 5500 is the new Cisco firewall model series which followed the successful Cisco PIX firewall appliance. Cisco calls the ASA 5500 a “security appliance” instead of just a “hardware firewall”, because the ASA is not just a firewall. This device combines several security functionalities, such as Intrusion Detection, Intrusion Prevention, Content Inspection, Botnet Inspection, in addition to the firewall functionality.

However, the core ASA functionality is to work as a high performance firewall. All the other security features are just complimentary services on top of the firewall functionality. Having said that, the purpose of a network firewall is to protect computer and IT resources from malicious sources by blocking and controlling traffic flow. The Cisco ASA firewall achieves this traffic control using Access Control Lists (ACL).

An ACL is a list of rules with permit or deny statements. Basically an Access Control List enforces the security policy on the network. The ACL (list of policy rules) is then applied to a firewall interface, either on the inbound or on the outbound traffic direction. If the ACL is applied on the inbound traffic direction (in), then the ACL is applied to traffic entering a firewall interface. The opposite happens for ACL applied to the outbound (out) direction.

The ACL permit or deny statements basically consist of source and destination IP addresses and ports. A permit ACL statement allows the specified source IP address/network to access the specified destination IP address/network. The opposite happens for deny ACL statements. At the end of the ACL, the firewall inserts by default an implicit DENY ALL statement rule which is not visible in the configuration.

Enough theory so far. Let us see some examples below to clarify what we have said above.

The basic command format of the Access Control List is the following:

ciscoasa(config)# access-list “access_list_name” extended {deny | permit} protocol “source_address” “mask” [source_port] “dest_address” “mask” [ dest_port]

To apply the ACL on a specific interface use the access-group command as below:

ciscoasa(config)# access-group “access_list_name” [in|out] interface “interface_name”

Example1:

Allow only http traffic from inside network 10.0.0.0/24 to outside internet

ciscoasa(config)# access-list HTTP-ONLY extended permit tcp 10.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 any eq 80

ciscoasa(config)# access-group HTTP-ONLY in interface inside

The name “HTTP-ONLY” is the Access Control List itself, which in our example contains only one permit rule statement. Remember that there is an implicit DENY ALL rule at the end of the ACL which is not shown by default.

Example2:

Deny telnet traffic from host 10.1.1.1 to host 10.2.2.2 and allow everything else.

ciscoasa(config)# access-list DENY-TELNET extended deny tcp host 10.1.1.1 host 10.2.2.2 eq 23

ciscoasa(config)# access-group DENY-TELNET in interface inside

The above example ACL (DENY-TELNET) contains two rule statements, one deny and one permit. As we mentioned above, the “access-group” command applies the ACL to an interface (either to an inbound or to an outbound direction).

Example3:

The example below will deny ALL TCP traffic from our internal network 192.168.1.0/24 towards the external network 200.1.1.0/24. Also, it will deny HTTP traffic (port 80) from our internal network to the external host 210.1.1.1. All other traffic will be permitted from inside.

ciscoasa(config)# access-list INSIDE_IN extended deny tcp 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0 200.1.1.0 255.255.255.0

ciscoasa(config)# access-group INSIDE_IN in interface inside

The usage of object groups (network objects, service object etc) is becoming more popular on Cisco ASA firewalls especially with the new OS version 8.3(x). In this version, network object groups are used extensively for the configuration of NAT mechanisms in addition to other uses. In this post I will show a quick example of using network objects with access lists. In another post I will expand this to show how object groups are used with NAT as well.

Suppose we have a few Web servers located on a DMZ which are accessed from the Internet. We want to enable http (80) and https (443) access from internet towards these web servers.

Assume that we have configured static NAT for those web servers and translated their real private IP addresses to the following Public IP addresses:

Web Server1: 50.50.50.1
Web Server2: 50.50.50.2
Web Server3: 50.50.50.3

Configuration of access list using object groups:

! create a service group for the http and https protocols
object-group service http-protocols tcp
port-object eq 80
port-object eq 443

! create a network object group for the web servers
object-group network webservers
network-object host 50.50.50.1
network-object host 50.50.50.2
network-object host 50.50.50.3

! create the access list applied inbound on the outside interface
access-list OUTSIDE-IN extended permit tcp any object-group webservers object-group http-protocols

access-group OUTSIDE-IN in interface outside

One of the ways to configure authentication between two Cisco ASA firewalls having a site-to-site IPSec VPN tunnel between them is to configure a pre-shared key under the tunnel group attributes. This is actually the most common implementation of IPSEC lan-to-lan authentication that you will find in most real life networks.

The pre-shared key must be the same on both IPSEC VPN devices between which the secure tunnel is created. To configure the pre-shared key on a Cisco ASA:

tunnel-group 1.1.1.1 type ipsec-l2l
tunnel-group 1.1.1.1 ipsec-attributes
pre-shared-key key123

Now, after configuring the pre-shared key, it is stored as encrypted hash on the ASA appliance and therefore when you view the running configuration (show run) you don’t see the actual clear text key anymore (i.e instead of “key123” you will see “*”).

Ciscoasa# show run

tunnel-group 1.1.1.1 type ipsec-l2l
tunnel-group 1.1.1.1 ipsec-attributes
pre-shared-key *

The problem arises when you forget the pre-shared key after a few months and you want to change one of the VPN tunnels. This situation happened to me recently when I had to change the public IP address on one of the ASA sites which had a Lan-to-Lan tunnel with a second ASA. Therefore I had to reconfigure the tunnel group and re-enter the old pre-shared key. However, I did not have it stored in clear text anywhere. The way to recover the pre-shared key is actually simple. Use the more system:running-config command. This command shows the pre-shared key in clear text format:

Ciscoasa# more system:running-config

…..
…..
tunnel-group 1.1.1.1 ipsec-attributes
pre-shared-key key123