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Medium NetworkFirewall · regional

The default stateless action for Network Firewall policies should be drop or forward for fragmented packets

Checks that the Network Firewall policy's default stateless action for fragmented packets is Drop or Forward to stateful rule groups, not Pass, so a UDP fragment that no stateless rule matches is not let through without inspection. Fragments of other protocols are always dropped.

service
NetworkFirewall
severity
Medium
scope
evaluated in every region

How to fix it

  • Can break clients: Unmatched UDP fragments stop passing on every firewall using this policy: Drop blocks them, and Forward to stateful rule groups lets the stateful rules decide.
  • Affects another check: Use the same actions for all packets also sets the action for full packets, which NetworkFirewall.4 checks.

In the console

VPC → Network Firewall → Firewall policies → the policy → Stateless default actions

Stateless default actions
Forward to stateful rule groups or Drop for fragmented packets, or for all packets; Pass fails

With the AWS CLI

  • Overwrites existing settings: update-firewall-policy replaces the whole policy document, so start from describe-firewall-policy, which also returns the update token, and change only the default actions.
aws network-firewall update-firewall-policy --firewall-policy-arn <policy-arn> --update-token <update-token> --firewall-policy file://firewall-policy.json --region <region>

With Terraform

resource "aws_networkfirewall_firewall_policy" "this" {
  name = var.policy_name

  firewall_policy {
    stateless_default_actions          = ["aws:forward_to_sfe"]
    stateless_fragment_default_actions = ["aws:forward_to_sfe"]
  }
}

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