This article provides background information about the Internet firewall for your account.
For more information about configuring the Internet firewall, see Managing the Internet Firewall Policy.
The Internet firewall inspects traffic between the WAN and the Internet and lets you create rules to control this traffic. Similar to the WAN firewall, the Internet firewall uses an ordered rulebase, starting from the first rule, connections are inspected according to each rule. The Internet firewall uses a blacklist approach. This means that there is an implicit ANY - ANY rule to allow any traffic and connections that are not explicitly blocked in the rulebase. The Internet firewall also includes full layer 7 functionality with User Awareness, and you can create rules for specific applications. For example, you can use the Internet firewall to:
-
Block specific website such as Facebook or LinkedIn
-
Block categories of inappropriate websites, such as Guns, Alcohol, and Gambling
-
Allow only the IT department to use remote administration applications (SaaS and IaaS)
Note
Note: Autonomous Firewall insights is an Early Availability (EA) feature that is only available for limited release. For more information, contact your Cato Networks representative or send an email to ea@catonetworks.com.
The Autonomous Firewall Insights are a list of best practices that evaluate your Internet Firewall policy and show how they comply with Cato’s recommendations. Following these recommendations optimizes your firewall configurations and improves security posture.
There are two types of insights:
-
Powered by AI: Enabled rules in your Internet Firewall policy are automatically analyzed by Artificial intelligence to detect issues, for example, rules that can be discarded or modified such as:
-
Rules that are expired or soon to expire: Rules created to address a specific need and have a desirable cutoff date that has already passed or that has not yet been reached or cannot be proven/evaluated.
-
Temporary rules: Introduced as a short-term solution to address an immediate need. These rules are mostly created to function temporarily while a proper or permanent solution is being deployed or developed.
-
Test rules: Rules explicitly created for validating, debugging, or experimenting with a specific feature or scenario.
-
-
Configuration-based: The configurations and settings in your Internet Firewall policy are to ensure they follow best practice.
One of the basic functionalities of an NGFW is to protect against anti-spoofing attacks. The security engines in the Cato Cloud implicitly drop any connection where the source IP is outside the scope of the configured entity (such as site, network range, device, or user). This blocks anti-spoofing attacks and prevents violations of the configured logical topology.
The Internet firewall inspects connections sequentially, and checks to see if the connection matches a rule. The final rule in the rulebase is an implicit ANY - ANY allow rule - so if a connection does not match a rule, then it is allowed by the final implicit rule.
Rules that are at the top of the rulebase have a higher priority because they are applied to connections before the rules lower down in the rulebase. If a connection matches on rule #3, the action is applied to the connection and the firewall stops inspecting it. The firewall does not continue to apply rules #4 and below to the connection.
The Cato Networks Master Service Agreement (MSA) defines traffic that is potentially illegal or malicious that is automatically blocked. There is a hidden implicit rule at the top of the Internet firewall rulebase that blocks these connections.
For more about the MSA, see Cato Networks MSA.
When there is a rule with objects in multiple columns, such as an application and a service, then there is an AND relationship between them. For example, if there is a rule that blocks the Netflix application for port 443, then the traffic is blocked when it matches both the application and the port.
For rules that use multiple objects in a single column, such as more than one application, then there is an OR relationship between them. For example, if there is a rule that blocks access to the Netflix, iTunes, and YouTube applications, then the traffic is blocked when it matches any of the applications.
Note
Note: Each rule can have a maximum of 64 conditions with an AND relationship between them, and a rule's exceptions are included in the rule limit. For example, if there is a rule with two AND conditions (such as a source and a service), and the rule has 25 exceptions with 3 AND conditions each (such as a source, an app, and a service), then the rule has 77 conditions. This exceeds the supported limit of 64 conditions and the rule might not function properly. However, you can assign more than 64 objects within the same column of a rule, since there is an OR relationship between them. For example, you can assign more than 64 apps in one rule.
The hit count helps you identify unused rules that can be removed from a policy, and optimize rule configuration to better match the required traffic scope. The hit count for a rule is based on the number of events generated by the rule. If a rule does not generate events, the hit count is zero.
The hit count contains two numbers:
-
The approximate number of events generated by each rule in the policy
-
How often the rule is hit relative to other rules (ranked by percentile)
These values are updated once every 24 hours and are based on the past 14 days of traffic.
You can quickly identify the rules with the highest and lowest hit count, based on the color of the status bar. This color reflects how often the rule is hit relative to other rules:
-
Blue: 0 - 24th percentile
-
Green: 25th - 49th percentile
-
Orange: 50th - 74th percentile
-
Red: 75th -100th percentile
The Internet Firewall lets different admins edit the policy in parallel. Each admin can edit rules and save the changes to the rulebase in their own private revision, and then publish them to the account policy (the published revision). For more information on how to manage policy revisions, see Working with Policy Revisions.
This section explains the fields and settings for the rules in the Internet firewall rule base. A thorough understanding of the Internet firewall helps to successfully manage access control for the corporate network.
Rule Actions
The following table describes the actions that each firewall rule can apply to the network traffic. For actions that generate events, you can show event logs in Home > Events.
|
Item |
Description |
|---|---|
|
|
Firewall allows matching traffic. |
|
|
Firewall blocks matching traffic. |
|
|
Firewall redirects matching traffic to a web page with a message. The user is prompted to decide whether or not to continue. You can customize the prompt web page, see Customizing the Block/Prompt Page. To review events for when a user chooses to proceed after a prompt page, filter the Events page to show events with the Prompt Action field set with the value Proceed. |
For a description of the different rulebase columns and Source, App, and Category items for rules, see What is the Cato WAN Firewall? and Reference for Rule Objects. Unlike the WAN firewall, the Destination for the Internet firewall is always the Internet. When there are multiple columns configured for a rule, then there is an AND relationship between them.
Rule order is defined by setting a rule’s position relative to other rules. For example, set a rule to follow a specific rule, or to be first in a section.
These are the options for defining the rule order:
-
Before Rule - The rule is positioned immediately before the selected rule
-
After Rule - The rule positioned immediately after the selected rule
-
First in Section - The rule is positioned first in the selected section
-
Last in Section - The rule is positioned last in the selected section
-
First - The rule is positioned at the top of the rulebase
-
Last - The rule is positioned at the bottom of the rulebase
The Internet firewall in the Cato Cloud lets you control Internet access for your corporate network. Easily create an Internet security policy that allows users to access business-related web content and blocks inappropriate websites, applications, and so on.
0 comments
Article is closed for comments.