opensnitch/README.md

OpenSnitch is a GNU/Linux port of the Little Snitch application firewall.

Daemon

The daemon is implemented in Go and needs to run as root in order to interact with the Netfilter packet queue, edit iptables rules and so on, in order to compile it you will need to install the libpcap-dev and libnetfilter-queue-dev libraries on your system, then just:

cd daemon
go build .

Qt5 UI

The user interface is a python script running as a gRPC server on a unix socket, to order to install its dependencies:

cd ui
pip install -r requirements.txt

Running

First, you need to decide in which folder opensnitch rules will be saved, it is suggested that you just:

mkdir -p ~/.opensnitch/rules

Now run the daemon:

sudo /path/to/daemon -ui-socket unix:///tmp/osui.sock -rules-path ~/.opensnitch/rules

And the UI service as your user:

python /path/to/ui/main.py --socket unix:///tmp/osui.sock

You can also use --socket "[::]:50051" to have the UI use TCP instead of a unix socket and run the daemon on another computer with -ui-socket "x.x.x.x:50051" (where x.x.x.x is the IP of the computer running the UI service).

Rules

Rules are stored as JSON files inside the -rule-path folder, in the simplest cast a rule looks like this:

{
   "created": "2018-04-07T14:13:27.903996051+02:00",
   "updated": "2018-04-07T14:13:27.904060088+02:00",
   "name": "deny-simple-www-google-analytics-l-google-com",
   "enabled": true,
   "action": "deny",
   "duration": "always",
   "operator": {
     "type": "simple",
     "operand": "dest.host",
     "data": "www-google-analytics.l.google.com"
   }
}

Field	Description
created	UTC date and time of creation.
update	UTC date and time of the last update.
name	The name of the rule.
enabled	Use to temporarily disable and enable rules without moving their files.
action	Can be deny or allow.
duration	For rules persisting on disk, this value is default to always.
operator.type	Can be simple, in which case a simple == comparision will be performed, or regexp if the data field is a regular expression to match.
operator.operand	What element of the connection to compare, can be one of: true (will always match), process.path (the path of the executable), user.id, dest.ip, dest.host or dest.port.
operator.data	The data to compare the operand to, can be a regular expression if type is regexp.

An example with a regular expression:

{
   "created": "2018-04-07T14:13:27.903996051+02:00",
   "updated": "2018-04-07T14:13:27.904060088+02:00",
   "name": "deny-any-google-analytics",
   "enabled": true,
   "action": "deny",
   "duration": "always",
   "operator": {
     "type": "regexp",
     "operand": "dest.host",
     "data": "(?i).*analytics.*\\.google\\.com"
   }
}

An example whitelisting a whole process:

{
   "created": "2018-04-07T15:00:48.156737519+02:00",
   "updated": "2018-04-07T15:00:48.156772601+02:00",
   "name": "allow-simple-opt-google-chrome-chrome",
   "enabled": true,
   "action": "allow",
   "duration": "always",
   "operator": {
     "type": "simple",
     "operand": "process.path",
     "data": "/opt/google/chrome/chrome"
   }
 }

FAQ

Why Qt and not GTK?

I tried, but for very fast updates it failed bad on my configuration (failed bad = SIGSEGV), moreover I find Qt5 layout system superior and easier to use.

Why gRPC and not DBUS?

The UI service is able to use a TCP listener instead of a UNIX socket, that means the UI service itself can be executed on any operating system, while receiving messages from a single local daemon instance or multiple instances from remote computers in the network, therefore DBUS would have made the protocol and logic uselessly GNU/Linux specific.