Interfaces and Zones

A Firewall is a gateway device that may be the nexus point for more than 2 networks. The interface that the traffic is coming in on and should be going out on is a fundamental concern for the purposes of routing as well as security. Routing, policies and addresses are all associated with interfaces. The interface is essentially the connection point of a subnet to the FortiGate unit and once connected can be connected to other subnets.

Physical interfaces or not the only ones that need to be considered. There are also virtual interfaces that can be applied to security policies. VLANs are one such virtual interface. Interfaces if certain VPN tunnels are another.

Policies are the foundation of the traffic control in a firewall and the Interfaces and addressing is the foundation that policies are based upon. Using the identity of the interface that the traffic connects to the FortiGate unit tells the firewall the initial direction of the traffic. The direction of the traffic is one of the determining factors in deciding how the traffic should be dealt with. You can tell that interfaces are a fundamental part of the policies because, by default, this is the criteria that the policies are sorted by.

Zones are a mechanism that was created to help in the administration of the firewalls. If you have a FortiGate unit with a large number of ports and a large number of nodes in you network the chances are high that there is going to be some duplication of policies. Zones provide the option of logically grouping multiple virtual and physical FortiGate firewall interfaces. The zones can then be used to apply security policies to control the incoming and outgoing traffic on those interfaces. This helps to keep the administration of the firewall simple and maintain consistency.

For example you may have several floors of people and each of the port interfaces could go to a separate floor where it connects to a switch controlling a different subnet. The people may be on different subnets but in terms of security they have the same requirements. If there were 4 floors and 4 interfaces a separate policy would have to be written for each floor to be allowed out on to the Internet off the WAN1 interface. This is not too bad if that is all that is being done, but now start adding the use of more complicated policy scenarios with Security Profiles, then throw in a number of Identity based issues and then add the complication that people in that organization tend to move around in that building between floors with their notebook computers.

Each time a policy is created for each of those floors there is a chance of an inconsistency cropping up. Rather than make up an additional duplicate set of policies for each floor, a zone can be created that combines multiple interfaces. And then a single policy can created that uses that zone as one side of the traffic connection.