Netfence – Like Envoy for eBPF Filters
To power the firewalling for our agents so that they couldn't contact arbitrary services, I build netfence. It's like Envoy but for eBPF filters. It allows you to define different DNS-based rules that are resolved in a local daemon to IPs, then pushed to the eBPF filter to allow traffic. By doing it this way, we can still allow DNS-defined rules, but prevent contacting random IPs. There's also no network performance penalty, since it's just DNS lookups and eBPF filters referencing memory. It also means you don't have to tamper with the base image, which the agent could potentially manipulate…
In plain words
Netfence is a firewalling tool that uses eBPF filters to enforce DNS-based network rules on agents and containers. It resolves DNS-defined rules to IP addresses in a local daemon, then enforces them through eBPF filters without impacting network performance. The tool automatically manages filter lifecycles across containers and micro VMs, and doesn't require modifications to base images. It uses a control plane similar to Envoy's xDS for rule management.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
To power the firewalling for our agents so that they couldn't contact arbitrary services, I build netfence. It's like Envoy but for eBPF filters. It allows you to define different DNS-based rules that are resolved in a local daemon to IPs, then pushed to the eBPF filter to allow traffic. By doing it this way, we can still allow DNS-defined rules, but prevent contacting random IPs. There's also no network performance penalty, since it's just DNS lookups and eBPF filters referencing memory. It also means you don't have to tamper with the base image, which the agent could potentially manipulate to remove rules (unless you prevent root maybe). It automatically manages the lifecycle of eBPF filters on cgroups and interfaces, so it works well for both containers and micro VMs (like Firecracker). You implement a control plane, just like Envoy xDS, which you can manage the rules of each cgroup/interface. You can even manage DNS through the control plane to dynamically resolve records (which is helpful as a normal DNS server doesn't know which interface/cgroup a request might be coming from). We specifically use this to allow our agents to only contact S3, pip, apt, and npm.
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