Rejecting Versus Denying a Packet

The Netfilter firewall mechanism in iptables gives you the option of either rejecting or dropping packets. What's the difference? As shown in Figure 2.5, when a packet is rejected, the packet is thrown away and an ICMP error message is returned to the sender. When a packet is dropped, the packet is simply thrown away without any notification to the sender.

Figure 2.5. Rejecting versus denying a packet.

Silently dropping the packet is almost always the better choice, for three reasons. First, sending an error response doubles the network traffic. The majority of dropped packets are dropped because they are malevolent, not because they represent an innocent attempt to access a service you don't happen to offer. Second, a packet that you respond to can be used in a denial-of-service (DoS) attack. Third, any response, even an error message, gives the would-be attacker potentially useful information.