Part 10 - Identity Awareness

[_Val_]

Introduction

Identity Awareness (IA) allows you to easily add user, user group, and machine identity intelligence to your security defenses.

Traditionally, firewalls use IP addresses to monitor traffic and are unaware of the user and computer identities behind those IP addresses.

Identity Awareness maps users and computer identities to IP addresses, allowing you to enforce access and audit data based on identity. IA is an easy to deploy and scalable solution. It is applicable for both Active Directory and non-Active Directory based networks, as well as for employees and guest users.

Check Point supports both local and external users. Local users are defined on Security Management Server. External users are those whose records are managed on Active Directory, RADIUS, or an LDAP server.

Access Role objects define users, computers, and network locations as one object and can be used as a source or destination in a rule. Access Role objects can include one or more of these objects:

• Networks
• Users and user groups
• Computers and computer groups
• Remote access clients

The Identity Awareness Software Blade provides multiple methods to obtain a user’s identity, including:

• AD Query,
• Browser-Based,
• Identity Agents,
• RADIUS Accounting,
• Remote Access clients,
• Identity Collector and the Identity Web API.

For better understanding of IA methods, refer to Identity Awareness Administration Guide.

In this lecture, we will concentrate on Browser-Based method.

Enabling Identity Awareness

Let’s activate the IA Software Blade. Open your Security Gateway object and mark IA checkbox in Network Security space:

In the pop-up menu, mark AD Query and  Browser-Based Authentication.

Press Next.

At this stage, we need to connect to our AD server. In the lab, AD server is located in the DMZ, with IP address 172.16.20.100.

You need to specify Domain Name, Username, Password, and IP address of our AD server:

You will have to use admin AD account or, alternatively, set up a special account with permissions described in sk93938.

Press Connect and wait for “Successfully connected!” message to appear Press Next:

A new window explains how to set up Browser-Based Authentication. Review it carefully and press Next:

The final window shows you the summary of defined settings and provides a short instruction of setting up IA with your security policy. You can now press Finish:

Exit from the Security Gateway object by pressing OK:

You need to publish the changes:

Adding Identity Awareness to your Security Policy

We need to set up an Access Role before moving further. Go to objects menu and choose New > More > User > Access Role:

Set up a Name for your new Access Role object:

Leave Any Network in the Networks Tab. Go to the Users tab and choose a group you want to use. Note that we are skipping AD and User Group settings here:

Press OK:

Let’s edit our Security Policy. From our rule number 5, delete LanNetwork object and replace it with our Access Role object:

We need to activate Captive Portal. Right-click on Accept Action and chose More:

Mark Enable Identity Captive Portal:

We also need to create a rule allowing DNS to function. Place this rule above one you have just edited. Our policy should look like this:

Install Policy. Now we can run some tests.

Testing Identity Awareness

Try accessing any Web site, for example google.com. You should see an authentication prompt from your Captive Portal:

Type in username and password for your domain used and press Log In. After successful authentication, you will get the access to the requested Web site. At this point, you should be able to access other web resources without additional authentication.

Open SmartConsole go through Identity Awareness logs:

Double click on the log entry for more details:

This is the end of the lecture. Next time we will discuss Threat Prevention.