[Mashiro]

@rudra

The best way to find out what the Android iptables rules do is to analyze them. To do that you of course have to know what all the iptables chains, commands and options do. This is a learning curve for sure and you have to read the iptables handbook/manual, advanced guides and such I guess. I unfortunately don't have any personal experience or resources for that. Sorry.

I'd probably guess that the Android iptables handles all kind of traffic from WiFi, mobile Internet, tethering hotspot, tethering over USB/BT and such. Especially mobile Internet might need special rules due to the NAT and etc. And when you enable tethering you have to add forward rules to allow things like BT or USB to use the mobile connection and forward it to connected devices.

One thing I thought about is: maybe the Android developer guides and documentation pages have explanations? Another recommendation I would suggest is to ask at X D A . It is quite complex actually if you take afwall which uses the Android interna firewall tools: https://github.com/ukanth/afwall/wiki/IPtables




@tiwil

UFW is a iptables front-end that has been made to make the usage of iptables easier. It takes the easy input and converts it into iptables rules in the background. So you never have to touch more complex iptables configurations as ufw will do it for you.

UFW is not depending on virtualization as it is just a software package. That said though iptables on OpenVZ is limited. So of course not all UFW functions may work due to the limited iptables on OpenVZ VPSs.