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Application Layer Gateways (ALGs)

An Application Layer Gateway (ALG) is a software component that is designed to manage specific protocols such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) or File Transfer Protocol (FTP) on J-series Services Routers and SRX-series services gateways running JUNOS software. The ALG intercepts and analyzes the specified traffic, allocates resources, and defines dynamic policies to permit the traffic to pass securely through the Juniper Networks device.

A security policy contains many elements including services and applications. Services are objects that identify application protocols using Layer 4 information, such as standard and accepted TCP and UDP port numbers for application services like Telnet, FTP, SMTP, and HTTP.

The application option specifies the Layer 7 application that maps to a Layer 4 service. A predefined service already has a mapping to a Layer 7 application. However, for custom services, you must link the service to an application explicitly, especially if you want the policy to apply an Application Layer Gateway (ALG).

This chapter describes voice-over-IP (VoIP) ALGs and basic data ALGs. VoIP ALGs provide stateful application layer inspection and Network Address Translation (NAT) capabilities to VoIP signaling and media traffic. The ALG inspects the state of transactions, or calls, and forwards or drops packets based on the those states. The RPC ALG is a data ALG.

JUNOS software supports the ALGs described in the following sections.

This section includes:


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