fail2ban fails to ban SSH login failures

fail2ban is one of those magical programs that, in my experience, just works. I’ve inherited many systems with a working fail2ban configuration, and therefore I didn’t know much about configuring it or troubleshooting it.

Summary: by default, fail2ban on CentOS 7 does absolutely nothing!

One of the things that it is reported (falsely!) to do out-of-the-box is to block repeated SSH login failures. According to Protecting SSH with Fail2ban:

Fail2ban should now protect SSH out of the box. If Fail2ban notices six failed login attempts in the last ten minutes, then it blocks that IP for ten minutes.

I wanted to test this, so I set up 2 virtual machines, a victim and an attacker.

On the victim VM:
[ariel]# sudo yum install epel-release
[ariel]# sudo yum install fail2ban
[ariel]# sudo systemctl start fail2ban
[ariel]# sudo tail -f /var/log/fail2ban

On the attacker VM:
[caliban]# sudo yum install epel-release
[caliban]# sudo yum install sshpass
[caliban]# for i in `seq 1 100`; do sshpass -p 'TopSecret!' admin@ariel; done

And then I waited. And waited. And waited.

I confirmed that the defaults described matched what was in my /etc/fail2ban/jails.conf (excerpted):
bantime = 600
findtime = 600
maxretry = 5

In my test, I definitely exceeded that: about 30 failed attempts in 5 minutes. The failures appear in /var/log/secure, but nothing appears in /var/log/fail2ban.log!

From How To Protect SSH With Fail2Ban on CentOS 7 I found the fail2ban-client status command:

[ariel]# fail2ban-client status
Status
|- Number of jail: 0
`- Jail list:

Zero jails! That’s definitely a problem.

As mentioned in the above, I created a file, /etc/fail2ban/jail.local containing the following:
[sshd]
enabled = true

New results:
[ariel]# systemctl restart fail2ban
[ariel]# fail2ban-client status
Status
|- Number of jail: 1
`- Jail list: sshd

That looks better! /var/log/fail2ban.log now has new entries, and the attacker IP address has been banned! Just to confirm I tried to SSH to the machine from the attacker:

[caliban]# ssh admin@ariel
ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host

Great! Exactly what I expected to happen.

When I look at the /etc/fail2ban/jails.conf, I do not see enabled = true under the [sshd] section. In fact, part of that file explains that all jails are disabled by default:

# "enabled" enables the jails.
# By default all jails are disabled, and it should stay this way.
# Enable only relevant to your setup jails in your .local or jail.d/*.conf
#
# true: jail will be enabled and log files will get monitored for changes
# false: jail is not enabled
enabled = false

On CentOS 7, fail2ban is configured to work with firewalld. My next post describes using fail2ban with iptables on CentOS 7.

One thought on “fail2ban fails to ban SSH login failures”

  1. I just tested this on a Debian 9 install and found that, once you install fail2ban (i.e. sudo apt-get install fail2ban):

    • fail2ban is enabled and running by default
    • the sshd jail is enabled by default (by virtue of /etc/fail2ban/jail.d/defaults-debian.conf)

    I had been using primarily Debian previously, so that’s why it just magically worked for me in my experience. I think the Debian defaults are much more sane than the CentOS defaults.

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