FortiGate Firewall policy
• A FortiGate firewall policy is a set of rules configured on a FortiGate firewall device
that controls the traffic flow between different network segments.
• These policies define how incoming and outgoing network traffic should be
handled, including permitting, denying, or redirecting traffic based on various
criteria.
• In plain English, the FortiGate Firewall policy either Permit or Deny the traffic based
on the configuration.
• Policies are processed in order, from top to bottom. The first policy that matches
the criteria for a given packet will dictate the action taken on that packet. This
means the order in which policies are listed can significantly affect how traffic is
handled.
• Rules are assessed from top to bottom, and once a match is found, no further
evaluation is performed. If no match is found, the FortiGate firewall continues
searching through the remaining rules until the last one is evaluated. If no match
is found by the end, the session will be dropped.
• For traffic that doesn’t match any of the user-defined rules, the default
rules are applied. These default rules, which are predefined, are displayed
at the bottom of the security rule base.
• In FortiGate firewalls' security policies, sessions are created to support
bidirectional data flow.
• Security policy rules can be reordered, disabled, deleted, added, or cloned.