Managing your own rule groups in Amazon Network Firewall - Amazon Network Firewall
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Managing your own rule groups in Amazon Network Firewall

A Network Firewall rule group is a reusable set of criteria for inspecting and handling network traffic. You add one or more rule groups to a firewall policy as part of policy configuration. For more information about firewall policies and firewalls, see Firewall policies and Firewalls and firewall endpoints.

You can use your own rule groups and you can use rule groups that are managed for you by Amazon. For information on managed rule groups, see Using Amazon managed rule groups.

Network Firewall rule groups are either stateless or stateful. These rule groups determine how packets are evaluated in your network traffic inspection.

Stateless rule groups

Stateless rule groups evaluate packets in isolation. They define standard network connection attributes for examining a packet on its own, without additional context from the broader traffic flow.

Stateful rule groups

Stateful rule groups evaluate packets in the context of traffic flow. They define criteria for examining a packet within the context of its traffic flow and other related traffic.

Network Firewall uses a Suricata rules engine to process all stateful rules. You can write any of your stateful rules in Suricata compatible format. Alternatively, for domain list rules and for very basic rules, you can use an easy entry form provided by Network Firewall.

Stateful rule groups are available in the following categories:

Depending on the type of rule group, you might also define rules inside the rule group. Rules provide detailed criteria for packet inspection and specify what to do when a packet matches the criteria. When Network Firewall finds a match between the criteria and a packet, we say that the packet matches the rule group.

Follow the guidance in this section to manage your Amazon Network Firewall rule groups.

Note

This section and others that describe Suricata-based concepts are not intended to replace or duplicate information from the Suricata documentation. For more Suricata-specific information, see the Suricata documentation.

Topics