Fortinet 30B manual Firewall policies

Firewall policies Advanced configuration

Web Apply virus scanning and web content blocking to HTTP traffic.

Unfiltered Apply no scanning, blocking or IPS. Use the unfiltered content profile if no content protection for content traffic is required. Add this protection profile to firewall policies for connections between highly trusted or highly secure networks where content does not need to be protected.

The best way to begin creating your own protection profile is to open a predefined profile. This way you can see how a profile is set up, and then modify it suit your requirements. You access Protection profile options by going to Firewall > Protection Profile, and selecting Edit for one of the predefined profiles.

Protection profiles are used by the firewall policies to determine how network and Internet traffic is controlled, scanned and when necessary, rejected. The Protection Profiles can be considered the rules of the firewall policy. Because of this, you should take some time to review the various options to consider what you want the firewall policies to do. If, after setting the protection profile and firewall policies, traffic is not flowing or flowing too much, verify your profile settings.

The number of options and configuration for the protection profile is too vast for this document. For details on each protection profile feature and setting, see the FortiGate Administration Guide or the FortiGate Online Help.

Firewall policies

Firewall policies are instructions the FortiGate unit uses to decide what to do with a connection request. When the firewall receives a connection request, it analyzes it to extract its source address, destination address, and port number.

For the connection through the FortiGate unit to be successful, the source address, destination address, and service of the connection must match a firewall policy. The policy directs the firewall action for the connection. The action can be to allow the connection, deny the connection, require authentication before the connection is allowed, or process the packet as an IPSec VPN connection.

You can configure each firewall policy to route connections or apply network address translation (NAT) to translate source and destination IP addresses and ports. You also add protection profiles to firewall policies to apply different protection settings for the traffic controlled by firewall policies.

The FortiGate unit matches firewall policies by searching from the top of the firewall policy list and moving down until it finds the first match, then performs the required address translation, blocking and so on described by the protection profile, then passes on the packet information. This is important, because once the FortiGate unit finds a match to a policy, it will not continue down the list. You need to arrange policies in the policy list from more specific to more general.

For example, if you have two policies, one that blocks specific URLs or IP addresses, and another general policy that lets traffic through. If you put the general policy at the top, the FortiGate unit will act on the general policy, figuring the policy has been matched and potentially let the URLs or IPs you wanted blocked through.

Note: No traffic will flow through a FortiGate unit until at least one firewall policy is added.

	FortiGate-30B FortiOS 3.0 MR6 Install Guide
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