MutFi is a firewall that regulates service accessibility based on time, day, and host of incoming requests.
The name MutFi stands for mutable firewall, indicating that the firewall can mutate in time depending on the settings modified by authorized users. The software's functionality is built around the Netfilter firewall, which works with chains that IP packets traverse on their way to their destination. The chains consist of a set of rules that apply if a given condition is met.
The administrator sets up the rules, which are meant to apply to a specific IP range. However, authorized users can enable or disable rules according to their schedule and the set of hosts for whom they are responsible. MutFi wakes up at specified intervals and checks whether it needs to perform changes to the firewall settings. If required, it flushes the administrator-defined chains and rebuilds them with the current data that applies.
The software is flexible in that time slices are defined as one hour, but a time offset can be set to trigger changes at various minutes past the hour. IP ranges, which are more versatile than IP subnets, can define a range of hosts that requests may come from. Furthermore, users can restrict rules to actual allocated addresses and not to subnets that have unallocated stretches.
The MutFi software stores all the rules in a MySQL database, which also stores user data for authentication purposes and access control lists for authorization purposes. Recent updates to the software include fixing an extra bracket in addrule.php. Overall, MutFi is an efficient and flexible firewall software that enables organizations to control access to services based on specific criteria.
Version 0.1.3: N/A