Linux Firewall & Cloud Security Group Rule Generator

Design stateful inbound/outbound firewall policies visually and translate them simultaneously into modern nftables, iptables, Ubuntu UFW, RHEL firewalld, and Terraform AWS Security Group HCL blocks.

Translated Multi-Platform Firewall Rules

1. Modern Linux nftables (Debian 12+ / Ubuntu 22.04+ / RHEL 9+)

2. Legacy iptables & Ubuntu UFW

3. RHEL / Rocky firewalld & Terraform AWS Security Group

Migrating from Legacy iptables to nftables & Cloud Security Groups

Linux packet filtering has undergone a major architectural transition from the legacy xtables/iptables framework—which evaluated separate linear chains for IPv4 (iptables), IPv6 (ip6tables), and ARP—to the unified nftables Netfilter subsystem inside modern Linux kernels. With an inet address-family table, a single nftables rule set enforces stateful connection tracking (ct state established,related accept), native port sets, and token-bucket rate meters atomically without reloading entire rule tables during updates.

When hardening production hosts, always layer cloud perimeter Security Groups alongside host-level firewalls (defense in depth). Cloud Security Groups (such as AWS VPC Security Groups) are strictly stateful allowlists—they evaluate return traffic automatically and do not support explicit DROP rules or per-IP connection-rate throttling. Host-level nftables or UFW complements cloud SGs by enforcing interface-scoped rules (for example, allowing internal database ports solely over a wg0 WireGuard interface) and throttling SSH/API connection bursts before user-space daemons spend CPU cycles on cryptographic handshakes.