Question

I might be asking wrong questions now but bear with me.

I have a Linux system with a daemon and a web front end to it. The daemon accepts socket request on a certain port and receive commands. Normally, such commands are issued by the web front end, which has it’s secure login procedure. However, as HTTP allows anybody from telnet-ing onto that port and issue raw commands, I need a way of protecting the system from abuse.

I actually don’t think there is a way to configure apache to no allow telnet because then the whole thing probably wouldn’t work any more.

So is there any way to only allow socket created from local host?

ps. I know there is local version of socket but I’d like to avoid it – reason is that I’ve written an automated testing framework depending on remote connection.

Thanks,

Answer 1

Use iptables to restrict access to port 80 only to connections from localhost

iptables -I INPUT -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 80 -i lo
iptables -A INPUT -j DROP -p tcp --destination-port 80 -i eth0