The use of different proxy profiles and profile options

Just like other components of the FortiGate, there is the option for different Proxy Option profiles so that you can be very granular in your control of the workings of the FortiGate. In the case of the Proxy Option profiles the thing that you will want to focus on is the matching up of the correct profile to a firewall policy that is using the appropriate protocols. If you are creating a Proxy Option profile that is designed for policies that control SMTP traffic into your network you only want to configure the settings that apply to SMTP. You do not need or want to configure the HTTP components.

 

Oversized File Log

This setting is for those that would like to log the occurrence of oversized files being processed. It does not change how they are processed it only enables the FortiGate unit to log that they were either blocked or allowed through. A common practice is to allow larger files through without antivirus processing. This allows you to get an idea of how often this happens and decide on whether or not to alter the settings relating to the treatment of oversized files.

The setting of the threshold for what is considered to be an oversized file is located in the Oversized File / Email Threshold that is found in some of the protocol options for the Proxy Options.

 

Protocol Port Mapping

While each of the protocols listed has a default TCP port that is commonly used, the level of granularity of control on the FortiGate firewall allows that the port used by the protocols can be individually modified in each separate Profile. It can also be set to inspect any port with flowing traffic for that particular protocol. The headers of the packets will indicate which protocol generated the packet. To optimize the resources of the unit the mapping and inspection of protocols can be enabled or disabled depending on your requirments.

 

Comfort Clients

When proxy-based antivirus scanning is enabled, the FortiGate unit buffers files as they are downloaded. Once the entire file is captured, the FortiGate unit begins scanning the file. During the buffering and scanning procedure, the user must wait. After the scan is completed, if no infection is found, the file is sent to the next step in the process flow. If the file is a large one this part of the process can take some time. In some cases enough time that some users may get impatient and cancel the download.

The comfort client feature to mitigates this potential issue by feeding a trickle of data while waiting for the scan to complete so as to let the user know that processing is taking place and that there hasn’t been a failure in the transmission. This slow transfer rate continues until the antivirus scan is complete. Once the file has been successfully scanned without any indication of viruses the transfer will proceed at full speed.

If there is evidence of an infection the FortiGate unit caches the URL and drops the connection. The client does not receive any notification of what happened because the download to the client had already started. Instead, the download stops and the user is left with a partially downloaded file. If the user tries to download the same file again within a short period of time, the cached URL is matched and the download is blocked. The client receives the Infection cache message replacement message as a notification that the download has been blocked. The number of URLs in the cache is limited by the size of the cache.

Client comforting is available for HTTP and FTP traffic. If your FortiGate unit supports SSL content scanning and inspection, you can also configure client comforting for HTTPS and FTPS traffic.

Buffering the entire file allows the FortiGate unit to eliminate the danger of missing an infection due to fragmentation because the file is reassembled before examination. Client comforting can send unscanned and therefore potentially infected content to the client. You should only enable client comforting if you are prepared to accept this risk. Keeping the client comforting interval high and the amount low will reduce the amount of potentially infected data that is downloaded.

 

Oversized File/Email Threshold

This is another feature that is related to antivirus scanning. The FortiGate unit has a finite amount of resources that can be used to buffer and scan a file. If a large file such as an ISO image or video file was to be downloaded this could not only overwhelm the memory of the FortiGate, especially if there were other large files being downloaded at the same time, but could exceed it as well. For this reason, how to treat large files needs to be addressed.

A threshold is assigned to determine what should be considered an oversize file or email. This can be set at any size from 1 MB to 50 MB. Any file or email over this threshold will not be processed by the Antivirus Security Profiles. Once a file is determined to be oversized it must be then determined whether to allow it or to block it.

These settings are not a technical decision but a policy one that will depend on your comfort level with letting files into your network. As there often is, there is a compromise between convenience or ease of use and security. If you want to go for a high peace of mind level you can configure the firewall to block oversized files and thus no files would be coming into the network that have not been scanned. If you are looking for optimizing the memory of the FortiGate unit and making sure that everybody is getting the files they want, you can lower the threshold and allow files that are over the threshold.

It should be noted that in terms of probability that malware is more likely to be found in smaller files than in larger files. A number of administrators take this into account when they lower the default threshold so as to lessen the impact on memory if they see the FortiGate unit going into conserve mode on a regular basis.

 

Chunked Bypass

The HTTP section allows the enabling of “Chunked Bypass”. This refers to the mechanism in version 1.1 of HTTP that allows a web server to start sending chunks of dynamically generated output in response to a request before actually knowing the actual size of the content. Where dynamically generated content is concerned this means that there is a faster initial response to HTTP requests. From a security stand point it means that the content will not be held in the proxy as an entire file before proceeding.

 

Allow Fragmented Messages

The specifications of RFC 2046 allow for the breaking up of emails and sending the fragments in parallel to be rebuilt and read at the other end by the mail server. It was originally designed to increase the performance over slower connections where larger email messages were involved. It will depend on your mail configuration if this is even possible for your network but outside of Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, not many email clients are set up to break up messages like this. The drawback of allowing this feature is that if malware is broken up between multiple fragments of the message the risk is run that it will not be detected by some antivirus configurations because the code may not all be present at the same time to identify.

 

Append Email Signature

The Append Email Signature is used when an organization would like to ensure that over and above our in this case underneath the existing personal signatures of the sender, all of the emails going out of their network have the appropriate “boilerplate”, for lack of a better term. These appended emails do not replace existing signatures. They are as the feature states, appended to the email.

 

Examples could include things like:

• Without prior approval the email should not be forwarded.
• Please be environmentally friendly and don’t print out emails
• For questions regarding the purchasing of our products please call…

It can be anything that the organization would like as long as it is in text format. The use of this feature usually works best in an environment where there is some standardization of what goes into the personal signatures of the senders so that there is no duplication or contradiction of information in the signatures.