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Magnus Mortensen
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

 

Understanding the FQDN ACL Feature

Starting in ASA version 8.4(2) (Feature not available in 8.5(1) code) , ACL entries can contain a new type of object that represents a fully qualified domain-name. This allows administrators to create ACL entries that contain a new object type fqdn that represents a hostname. For this functionality to work, the ASA must be able to resolve these FQDN's to one or more IP addresses. The object then becomes a representation of those IP addess(es).

 

Basic Configuration

Step 1: Define DNS server

Since the ASA has to be able to resolve each hostname to one or more IP addesses, we must define what DNS server the ASA can use.

 

domain-name cisco.com
!
dns domain-lookup inside 
dns server-group DefaultDNS 
 name-server 192.168.1.200 
 domain-name cisco.com

 

Step 2: Create the FQDN object for the host name in question

Similar to creating other object in the 8.3.x code and later, we need to define the fqdn under the object

 

object network obj-hr88.cisco.com
  fqdn hr88.cisco.com

 

Step 3: Add the FQDN Oject to an ACL

Reference the newly created Object in an ACL on the ASA so we can begin to resolve it

 

access-list inside_in deny ip any object obj-hr88.cisco.com
access-list inside_in permit ip any any

Verify the ACL with FQDNs

Once the access-list is applied to the security policy of the ASA, the ASA will resolve the DNS entries to IP addresses, then use those IP addresses in the access-list.

 

ASA# show access-list inside_in
access-list inside_in; 4 elements; name hash: 0xd3a8690b
access-list inside_in line 1 deny ip any object obj-hr88.cisco.com 
 access-list inside_in line 1 deny ip any fqdn hr88.cisco.com (resolved)
 access-list inside_in line 1 deny ip any host 10.32.2.4 (hr88.cisco.com) (hitcnt=10)
 access-list inside_in line 1 deny ip any host 10.32.2.3 (hr88.cisco.com) (hitcnt=35)
access-list inside_in line 2 permit ip any any (hitcnt=12022) 

The 'show dns' command will display the IP to hostname mappings currently active on the ASA

 

ASA# show dns
Name: hr88.cisco.com
  Address: 10.32.2.4           TTL 13:27:02
  Address: 10.32.2.3           TTL 13:27:02

Best Practices

Use a trusted DNS server

Obviously it is important that the DNS server used by the ASA for FQDN resolution is trusted, since the responses from this DNS server will affect the security policy of the ASA. You also want to ensure that your DNS server is stable and has a very low latency since your security policy will rely on the results it recieves.

 

Increase the lifetime for short-lived DNS records

When the ASA receives the response from the DNS server for the ACE hostname resolution, the answer has a Time to Live (TTL) associated with it. The ASA will keep that domain-to-ip mapping active until the TTL expires, at which time the ASA will re-resolve the IP address of the hostname.

 

The output of 'show dns host hostname' will show the TTL of the DNS entry on the ASA:

 

ASA-dns-acl.png

 

In some cases, DNS responses might be extremely short, on the order of a few seconds. Usually, low lifetimes like this are employed by DNS load-balancers and content hosting services where IP addresses change frequently. If many DNS entries are used on the ASA, short TTLs might cause the ASA to re-resolve the IP addresses very frequently, therby causing extra load on the ASA, DNS server, and the network.

 

The ASA can be manually configured to increase the TTL of each response it receives by a set time value, using the command

'dns expire-entry-timer minutes minutes'. For example, to increase the timeout by 60 minutes you would use the following command:

 

 dns expire-entry-timer minutes 60 

Limitations of the Feature

It should be emphasized that this new FQDN ACL feature on the ASA is not a replacement for URL filtering solutions. Administrators attempting to write basic ACL policies that permit or deny traffic to FQDN names outside of their organization might have intermittent success, due to the factors discussed below. The preferred methods for blocking access to certain websites is the use of an external URL filtering server, or by using the application inspection on the ASA to control the access.

 

Sites returning DNS responses with low TTL cause unpredictable access

Some popular websites such as www.facebook.com send back DNS responses with very low Time To Live (TTL) values. The screenshot below is from a packet capture. It shows that the DNS server responded back to the request and indicated that the TTL of the entry was only 20 seconds.

This means that a computer would continue to use the IP 69.171.224.14 for www.facebook.com for 20 seconds, and after 20 seconds it would re-resolve the DNS entry and use the new IP address the DNS server responded with :

 

smallDNSTTLfacebook.png

 

The ASA will behave slightly differently with the TTL indicated in the DNS response. By default (and at a minimum) the ASA always adds one minute to the TTL (due to the default command 'dns expire-entry-timer 1') of the response received to the DNS request, meaning that in this case the ASA would consider the entry valid for one minute and twenty seconds.

 

ASA# show dns
Name: www.facebook.com
  Address: 69.171.224.41                                 TTL 00:01:20
ASA#

The side effect of this is that the inside client will start using a new IP address for www.facebook.com one minute before the ASA updates its own IP to hostname mapping, and during that time the access-list line might not match. This would result in the clients being permitted or denied intermittently when they access www.facebook.com.

 

Multiple hostnames resolve to the same IP address

If two hostnames resolve to the same IP address, the ASA cannot distinguish between the two, since it is essentially blocking or permitting the traffic based on the destination IP address in the packet. Many popular webpages have moved away from hosting thier own content to using content delivery networks like Akamai, Amazon CWS. This means that come FQDN's may resolve to IP addresses used by these content hosting providers and they may host multiple sites worth of content on the same IP. This is also seen with Webhosting companies like GoDaddy, Network Solutions, etc. These providers may use one signle IP to host hundred of websites. The content served to you web-browser is determined based on the URL accessed (and the Host: field in the HTTP request). Let take a simple example of 'URL FIltering' and see how it can go awry. Here is the simplified config:

 

object network obj-superbadwebsite.com
   fqdn superbadwebsite.com
!
access-list inside_in deny ip any object obj-superbadwebsite.com
access-list inside_in permit ip any any

Now lets say that superbadwebsite.com is hosted by HostingCo which also hosts benign websites like catsinsinks.com (benign all-beit a time waster). HostingCo uses webservers at 64.102.67.9 an 64.102.67.10 so now our ACL looks like:

access-list inside_in line 1 deny ip any object obj-superbadwebsite.com 
  access-list inside_in line 1 deny ip any fqdn superbadwebsite.com (resolved) 
  access-list inside_in line 1 deny ip any host 64.102.67.10 (superbadwebsite.com)(hitcnt=5) 
  access-list inside_in line 1 deny ip any host 64.102.67.9 (superbadwebsite.com)(hitcnt=120) 
access-list inside_in line 2 permit ip any any (hitcnt=4423) 

 

If someone in your network wants to browse the site http://catsinsinks.com they will not be able to. This is because catsinsinks.com will resolve to either of the IP's that HostingCo uses, both of which are blocked because they were the A-Records returned when we resolved superbadwebsite.com. This issue can be summed up in the follow way:

 

FQDN functionality in ACLs is not a replacement for HTTP Filtering. It cannot distinguish what content is being sent.

 

Multiple DNS names for the same website

Another reason to stay away from URL filtering using FQDn's... if you were to create an object and use it to block the following fqdn "www.facebook.com" users may still be able to get to "facebook.com". This is because both FQDN's resolve to different IPs. Blocking one FQDN for a website does not always block all the possible was of accessing it:

 

admin@server> host www.facebook.com
www.facebook.com has address 69.171.224.13

admin@server> host facebook.com
facebook.com has address 69.63.181.12 
facebook.com has address 69.63.189.11
facebook.com has address 69.63.189.16
Comments
maik.behley
Level 1
Level 1

Can i use fqdn names as peer in a vpn configuration for addressing dynamically asa or router?

danpanetta
Community Member

Are there any plans to include this DNS-ACL feature in Core switch IOS code in the near future? 

markheneghan
Community Member

Does anyone know if this has been migrated to the FWSM as well?

vinlata2007
Level 1
Level 1

This is very good document and useful for simple acl-dns blocking site such as twitter, facebook, pandora...in the work  place, but I will also learn to use external URL filtering server or application inspection on the ASA as recommended

Also is there an equivalent command for object group fqdn for ASA older than 8.3? as I have asa 7.2 and it didn't recognize the command at all. Thanks

groupalia
Level 1
Level 1

Is there a way or workaround to use FQDN on ACL for anyconnect access? It seems its not posible by default and something needed in my company (We use the vpn to access 'akamaized' URLS, thats way i need FQDN... ):

ERROR: Access-list SSL_VPN contains user, user-group, security-group or FQDN objects. These are not supported by group policies.

xavier.

deismann1
Level 1
Level 1

That's a very interesting article!

I've noticed that the fqdn only resolves IPv4 addresses:

object network test-de
 fqdn www.google.de

asa01(config)# sh dns
Name: www.google.de
  Address: 173.194.112.247                               TTL 00:00:53
  Address: 173.194.112.248                               TTL 00:00:53
  Address: 173.194.112.255                               TTL 00:00:53
  Address: 173.194.70.94                                 TTL 00:05:57

In ASA OS 9.1 I can configure "fqdn v6 ...", but that resolves ONLY the v6 address. Is there a way to configure an object which resolves to the IPv4 AND IPv6 address of a host?

 

johnnylingo
Level 5
Level 5

It's not clear from the documention which interfaces "dns domain-lookup" should reference.  The answer, I believe, is any interface that may be used as egress to send the DNS query to the DNS server(s). 

 

 

 

 

chherna2
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

In order to allow a domain-name to be translated to ipv6 and ipv4 at the same time you just need to configure an object network for that domain-name as ipv4 and another object network for the same domain-name but using the v6 keyword as following:

object network test-de
 fqdn www.google.de

object network test-de-2
 fqdn v6 www.google.de

Then you will need to add both object networks to a object-group and apply the object-group in the ACL.

It is tested and working fine.

 

 

jlmickens
Level 1
Level 1

What about a domain with multiple hosts at various ip addresses?  I've been asked to open jabber ports (5552,5553) to hipchat.com.  They have 20+ servers at various IP addresses (Amazon hosted servers, from what I can tell).  According to hipchat's web site , the servers fluctuate, so they advise you to add *.hipchat.com to the whitelist, but the wildcard doesn't work for the fqdn entry.  Is this not possible?

Collin Clark
VIP Alumni
VIP Alumni

That's a perfect example of the shortcoming of using FQDN's in ACL's. There is no work around that I know of other than moving to a true web filtering product like WSA.

bhisham Sharma
Level 1
Level 1

Hi,

 

I am using ASA with Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance Software Version 8.0(4).

Do i have any option to use hostnames instead of IP? Object fqdn is not supported in this version.

 

Thanks

Bhisham

jlmickens
Level 1
Level 1

Bhisham,

The article states that the feature was implemented starting with version 8.4(2).  You would need to upgrade to use the FQDN.  What you could do in your version is create a Network Object, giving it the name and the IP address, then use the name in your rule set.  You would have to change the Network Object definition if the IP address of the host changes.

Magnus Mortensen
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

Correct. The dns domain-lookup should specify the interface that the ASA would use to reach the configured DNS Server.

Magnus Mortensen
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

Just to close the loop. The FWSM product line reached End Of Engineering a while ago and no feature like this was ever introduced. In addition, because of the way that the ACLs are compiled on the old FWSM hardware, rapidly changing hostnames would have caused significant headache and problems. 

bhisham Sharma
Level 1
Level 1

You mean to say like below? but in this case if the IPs change then i need to add new IPs in object group and this is what i wanted to avoid.

 

object-group network outlook.office365.com
 network-object host 199.200.24.x
 network-object host 199.200.24.x

access-list acl-inside extended permit tcp 10.x.2.0 255.255.255.0 object-group outlook.office365.com eq 443

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