Preface

Some of us who use web filters at home, such as Sophos XG to filter content, including HTTPS to remove ads, malware, and generally unsafe and suspicious content may encounter issues with some services that refuse to work if they detect MITM situation. Or you may be connecting to your home network from a finite number of places, so you would want to allow connections only from those networks.

Since there is only a finite number of such services and locations it is feasible to just whitelist them on a case-by-case basis.

The guide below explains how to come up with a compact list of IP ranges for a specific organization from a single IP address. The command lines below will work on BSD and macOS; feel free to adjust accordingly for your system.

Guide

As an example, consider Netflix. It does not like my firewall snooping on its traffics, so I had to whitelist it. I’m sure the process can be completely automated, including feeding the resulting network definitions into XG firewall, but for a handful of services, it is probably not worth the effort.

Start with a single IP

Find a single IP belonging to the IP range in question. For example, disabling web filter, turning on logging, and try to use the affected resource. Pick one of the IPs from the log. Let’s assume it was 192.173.64.0.

Determine the origin

Plug the IP address into service like ipinfo.io or radb.net to get the origin:

mbp:~ me$ curl ipinfo.io/192.173.64.0/org
AS2906 Netflix Streaming Services Inc.

mbp:~ me$ whois -h whois.radb.net -- '-l  192.173.64.0' |grep origin:
origin:     AS2906

Query all routes

Query the same database for all routes: lets limit to IPv4 for now. To include ipv6 – grep by ^route6::

mbp:~ me$ whois -h whois.radb.net -- '-i origin AS2906' |grep '^route:' |sed -e 's/route:[[:space:]]*\(\S*\)/\1/'
69.53.224.0/19
208.75.76.0/22
37.77.184.0/21

... [deleted 38 entries] ... 

23.246.15.0/24
108.175.47.0/24
23.246.29.0/24
23.246.28.0/24

Optimize and compact the network ranges

There are a bunch of calculators in existence, both online and command line; I stumbled upon this one TechZoom’s IP Address Calculator and keep using it successfully ever since.

Copy the output from the previous step and paste it into the calculator. You will get the following concatenated and optimized list, presented here in its entirety:

23.246.0.0-23.246.63.255
37.77.184.0-37.77.191.255
45.57.0.0-45.57.127.255
64.120.128.0-64.120.255.255
66.197.128.0-66.197.255.255
69.53.224.0-69.53.255.255
108.175.32.0-108.175.47.255
185.2.220.0-185.2.223.255
185.9.188.0-185.9.191.255
192.173.64.0-192.173.127.255
198.38.96.0-198.38.127.255
198.45.48.0-198.45.63.255
208.75.76.0-208.75.79.255

This is a much more manageable list suitable for even manual entry into a firewall list.