Which mechanism prevents public exposure when floating IPs are attached to permissive security groups?
0 reputation · 17 Jun 2023, 23:10 UTC
In OpenStack Neutron, security groups provide stateful filtering at the port level. While the default behavior restricts ingress traffic, a common risk involves instances assigned floating IPs that are associated with security groups containing permissive rules (e.g., 0.0.0.0/0 for administrative ports).
Because security groups are applied at the instance port, they do not provide a global subnet-level safeguard to override accidental permissive rules defined by users. This creates a dependency on individual port configurations to prevent unintended public exposure.
Does OpenStack provide a native, stateless subnet-level filtering mechanism that can act as a mandatory guardrail regardless of the port-level security group settings? If so, how does the priority between subnet-level ACLs and port-level security groups resolve when conflicting rules are present?