Viewing Firewall Policies

When you first go into the Policy window, found by going to Policy > Policy > Policy, you will see a table with a menu bar across the top. The menu bar will have the following items:

 

At the top left:

• Create New (with a “+” sign on the left and a downward pointing triangle on the right)
• Clone
• Delete
• Column Settings
• Filter Settings

 

At the top right:

• Section View
• Global View

 

The items at the top right with their radio buttons represent the 2 potential views that the policies can be displayed in.

The Global View shows all of the policies in the order of their sequence. With the default settings you will be able to see the sequence number in a column close to the left side of the table.

The Section view is similar to the Global View except that as the name implies it is divided into sections. By default the sections are based on the paths between the interfaces. These can be referred to as “interface pairings”. For instance, all of the policies referencing traffic from WAN1 to DMZ will be in one section. The policies referencing traffic from DMZ to WAN1 will be in another section.

The sections are collapsible so that you only need to look at the sections with policies you are interested in. It is possible to add customized subsections within the default sections of interface pairings. This would be useful in a situation where you have a lot of policies and would like to further compartmentalize them by common attributes so that things are easier to find.

The default column headings are:

• [Check box icon]
• Seq.#
• Source
• Destination
• Authentication
• Schedule
• Service
• Action
• Log

The column that are shown are configurable. All but the first 2 can be removed or their position changed. There are also a number of other columns that display information about the policies that can be added. One of the more useful ones that can be added is the ID column. The reason for adding this one is that policies are referenced by their ID number for simplicity and ease of administration. If you are looking in the CLI you will see that the only designation for a policy is its number and if you wish to change the order of a policy you will be asked to move it before or after another policy by referencing its number.

 

How “Any” policy can remove the Section View

The FortiGate unit will automatically change the view on the policy list page to Global View whenever a policy containing “any” in the Source interface/zone or Destination interface/zone is created. If the Section View is greyed out it is likely that one or more of the policies has “any” as a Source or Destination interface.

With the use of the “any” the policy should go into multiple sections because it could effectively be any of a number of interface pairings. As mentioned, policies are sectioned by using the interface pairings (for example, port1 -> port2) and each section has its own specific policy order. The order in which a policy is checked for matching criteria to a packet’s information is based solely on the position of the policy within its section or within the entire list of policies as a whole but if the policy is in multiple sections at the same time there is no mechanism for placing the policy in a proper order within all of those sections at the same time because it is a manual process and there is no parameter to compare the precedence of one section or policy over the other. Thus a conflict is created. In order to resolve the conflict the FortiGate firewall removes that aspect of the sections so that there is no need to compare and find precedence between the sections and it therefore has only the Global View to work with.

 

Security policy configuration extensions

When first creating the policy the configuration form will ask for a choice between the policy types of Firewall or VPN, Firewall being the default. Choosing whether or not to leave the selection as Firewall is straight forward. If the policy is not a policy based VPN policy then it is a Firewall policy type.

There are essentially 2 types of VPN connections, Interface Based and Policy Based. In an Interface Based VPN tunnel a logical interface is created that can be seen as an interface by the policies in the same way that any of the physical interfaces can be seen. Therefore to govern the traffic a regular policy will work. The policy based VPN tunnels work slightly different and therefore need a slightly different policy configuration. For a more detail explanation of the difference between the types of VPN tunnels refer to the VPN documentation found in the VPN handbooks or in the VPN section of the Complete Administration Guide.

Once either the Firewall or the VPN type has been chosen there is then a choice between one of subtypes for each of the Policy types. For the Firewall type of policy the subtypes are:

• Address
• User Identity
• Device Identity

The Address subtype refers to policies where access through the FortiGate firewall is dependant on the source location of the addresses of the devices involved in the traffic matched to the policy.

The User Identity subtype refers to policies where access through the FortiGate firewall is dependant on the users credentials or Identity.

The Device Identity subtype refers to policy where access through the FortiGate firewall is dependant on the specific device being used based on the MAC address of the device or belonging to a group of devices that are based on device types or belonging to custom made groups.

For the VPN type the subtypes are:

• IPsec
• SSL-VPN

As expected the two subtypes are the two different types of VPN tunnels that the FortiGate firewall supports in a policy based configuration.

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