About this document | Introduction |
Authentication timeout
An authenticated connection expires when it has been idle for a length of time that you specify. The authentication timeout value set in User > Authentication > Authentication applies to every user of the system. The choice of timeout duration is a balance between security and user convenience. The default is
5 minutes. For information about setting the authentication timeout, see “Authentication timeout” on page 47.
Firewall policies
Access control is defined in the firewall policy that provides access to the network resource. For example, access to the Internet through the external interface from workstations on the internal network is made possible by an Internal to External firewall policy.
Firewall policies apply web filtering, antivirus protection, and spam filtering to the traffic they control according to a protection profile. If the firewall policy requires authentication, the protection profile in the firewall policy is disabled. Instead, the protection profile is configured in the authenticating user group.
For more information about firewall policies and protection profiles, see the Firewall chapters of the FortiGate Administration Guide.
VPN tunnels
When you configure a PPTP or L2TP VPN, you choose one user group to be permitted access. For IPSec VPNs, you can use authentication by user group or XAUTH authentication using an external authentication server as an alternative to authentication by peer ID. Access to SSL VPN applications is controlled through user groups. When the remote client connects to the FortiGate unit, the FortiGate unit authenticates the user based on user name, password, and authentication domain. Authentication for a VPN allows access to only one group.
For more information about VPNs, see the FortiGate PPTP VPN User Guide,
FortiGate SSL VPN User Guide, or the FortiGate IPSec VPN User Guide.
About this document
This document explains how to configure authentication for firewall policies, PPTP, L2TP and SSL VPNs, and dialup IPSec VPNs, and contains the following chapters:
•Authentication servers contains procedures for configuring RADIUS, LDAP, and Microsoft Active Directory authentication servers.
•Users/peers and user groups contains procedures for defining users/peers and user groups.
•Configuring authenticated access contains procedures to set authentication timeouts, configure authentication in firewall policies, for PPTP, L2TP and SSL VPNs, and certain configurations of IPSec VPNs.
Document conventions
The following document conventions are used in this guide:
| FortiOS v3.0 MR7 User Authentication User Guide |
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