Geographic IP filtering in Suricata compatible AWS Network Firewall rule groups

Use Geographic IP filtering to filter on country codes for the IP addresses of network traffic. You can use Geographic IP filtering with Suricata compatible rule strings and with the standard Network Firewall stateful rule groups.

Suricata supports filtering for source and destination IPs. You can filter on either of these types by itself, by specifying dst or src. You can filter on the two types together with AND or OR logic, by specifying both or any. For more information see the Suricata geoip keyword documentation at IP Keywords: geoip.

To use a Geographic IP filter, you provide the geoip keyword, the filter type, and the country codes for the countries that you want to filter for, for example geoip:dst,CN,US;. For additional examples, see Stateful rules examples: Geographic IP filter.

For more information about adding Geographic IP filtering to your Suricata compatible rule groups via the console, see the Creating a stateful rule group procedure.

IPv4 and IPv6 support

The Network Firewall implementation of Suricata geoip provides support for IPv6 and IPv4. This is an expansion of the support provided by Suricata.

MaxMind IP geolocation

Suricata determines the location of requests using MaxMind GeoIP databases. MaxMind reports very high accuracy of their data at the country level, although accuracy varies according to factors such as country and type of IP. For more information about MaxMind, see MaxMind IP Geolocation.

If you think any of the geographic IP data is incorrect, you can submit a correction request to Maxmind at MaxMind Correct GeoIP Data.

Country codes

IP geolocation uses the alpha-2 country codes from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 3166 standard.

Network Firewall only allows you to save Geographic IP filter rules that have valid country codes.