Book Image

Check Point Firewall Administration R81.10+

By : Vladimir Yakovlev
Book Image

Check Point Firewall Administration R81.10+

By: Vladimir Yakovlev

Overview of this book

Check Point firewalls are the premiere firewalls, access control, and threat prevention appliances for physical and virtual infrastructures. With Check Point’s superior security, administrators can help maintain confidentiality, integrity, and the availability of their resources protected by firewalls and threat prevention devices. This hands-on guide covers everything you need to be fluent in using Check Point firewalls for your operations. This book familiarizes you with Check Point firewalls and their most common implementation scenarios, showing you how to deploy them from scratch. You will begin by following the deployment and configuration of Check Point products and advance to their administration for an organization. Once you’ve learned how to plan, prepare, and implement Check Point infrastructure components and grasped the fundamental principles of their operation, you’ll be guided through the creation and modification of access control policies of increasing complexity, as well as the inclusion of additional features. To run your routine operations infallibly, you’ll also learn how to monitor security logs and dashboards. Generating reports detailing current or historical traffic patterns and security incidents is also covered. By the end of this book, you'll have gained the knowledge necessary to implement and comfortably operate Check Point firewalls.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Introduction to Check Point, Network Topology, and Firewalls in Your Infrastructure and Lab
6
Part 2: Introduction to Gaia, Check Point Management Interfaces, Objects, and NAT
13
Part 3: Introduction to Practical Administration for Achieving Common Objectives

APCL/URLF layer structure

At the time of writing, Check Point's own user guide for versions R81 and up contained this incorrect statement:

"5. Create an Application Control Ordered Layer after the Firewall/Network Ordered Layer. Add rules to explicitly drop unwanted or unsafe traffic. Add an explicit cleanup rule at the bottom of the Ordered Layer to accept everything else.

Alternatively, put Application Control rules in an Inline Layer as part of the Firewall/Network rules. In the parent rule of the Inline Layer, define the Source and Destination"

The screenshot from the official documentation is as follows:

Figure 8.31 – Check Point's Best Practices for Access Control Rules error

If you were to follow this recommendation, then traffic to any IP and port on the internet would be allowed, unless explicit rules are present in the APCL/URLF layer to drop it.

Instead, I suggest using the following approach:

...