Firewall Policy Rules Main Page Fields

Seq.

Order number for the policy. Policy lookup is performed in the order that the policies are configured. The first policy that matches the traffic is used.

Hit Count

Displays how often a particular policy is used based on traffic flow. The hit count is the number of hits since the last reset. Click on the hit count value to view the details on the Hit Count Details page.

Example: The hit count is especially useful when you are using a large policy set and you want to verify which rules are highly used and which ones are rarely used. If you see that some of the rules are not being used, you can verify that the rules are not being shadowed by another policy. This helps you manage the device without having to generate traffic manually.

Rule Name

Unique name for the rule.

Src. Zone

Source zone (to-zone) that defines the context for the policy. Zone policies are applied on traffic entering one security zone (source zone) to another security zone (destination zone). This combination of a source zone and a destination zone is called a context.

For example, all policies within source zone trust and destination zone untrust are in the same context.

Src. Address

Address names or address set names to be used as match criteria for incoming traffic.

We recommend that you create address sets instead of using multiple address entries. For example, If your organization has common requirements for similar types of access across different rules, leveraging groups can be advantageous.

You can have any number of objects with a set (for example, host, network, DNS, wildcard, and so forth)

Src. ID

Users and roles to be used as match criteria for the policy.

You can have different policy rules based on the user role and user group.

If you specify the source identity in any policy within the zone pair, then user and role information is retrieved before policy lookup can proceed. (If all policies in the zone pair are set to any or have no entry in the Source Identity field, user and role information is not required and only the other five standard match criteria are used for policy lookup.)

Dest. Zone

Destination zone (from-zone) that defines the context for the policy.

Zone policies are applied on traffic entering one security zone (source zone) to another security zone (destination zone). This combination of a source zone and a destination zone is called a context.

For example, all policies within source zone trust and destination zone untrust are in the same context.

Dest. Address

Address names or address set names to be used as match criteria for outgoing traffic.

We recommend that you create address sets instead of using multiple address entries.

For example, if your organization has common requirements for similar types of access across different rules, leveraging groups can be advantageous.

You can have any number of objects with a set (for example, host, network, DNS, wildcard, and so forth).

Service

The service (application) name in the match criteria has one or more service or service sets.

We recommend that you create a service set and refer to the name of the set in a policy instead of using multiple individual service names.

For example, for a group of employees, you can create a service set that contains all the approved services. Service objects allow you to specify objects to be used in the match criteria of security policies. You can set numerous attributes to help define what the match criteria of this object should be.

Action

Action applies to all traffic that matches the specified criteria.

• Deny—Device silently drops all packets for the session and does not send any active control messages such as TCP Resets or ICMP unreachable.

• Reject—Device sends a TCP Reset if the protocol is TCP and ICMP Reset if the protocols are UDP, ICMP, or any other IP protocol. This option is useful when facing trusted resources so that the applications do not waste time waiting for timeouts and instead get the active message.

• Permit—Device permits traffic using the type of firewall authentication you applied to the policy.

• Tunnel—Device permits traffic using the type of VPN tunneling options you applied to the policy.