Policies

Gateway policies allow you to grant or deny your users access to specific domains or domain categories. If the WARP client is configured to send DNS requests over DoH to Gateway, the DNS queries are evaluated against content and security policies configured for the organization. If the domain is allowed, the client receives the DNS resolution and initiates an HTTP connection.

Cloudflare Gateway currently filters HTTP traffic over port 80 and 443. If the HTTP connection is within a TLS connection, the TLS connection will be terminated at Cloudflare Gateway so the HTTP traffic can be inspected (unless an administrator configures a bypass rule). If the HTTP connection does not violate any policies configured by an administrator, the traffic is allowed through to the origin server.

​DNS policies

When a user makes a DNS request to Gateway, Gateway matches the request against the content or security categories you have set up for your organization. If the domain does not belong to any blocked categories, or if it matches an override rule, the user's client receives the DNS resolution and initiates an HTTP connection.

DNS policies can be built by doing one or more of the following:

1. Selecting security threat categories you want to block.
2. Enabling SafeSearch.
3. Enabling YouTube Restricted Mode.
4. Selecting content categories you want to block.
5. Adding custom domains you want to block, allow, or override.

​Security threat categories

When creating a DNS policy, you can select as many security threat categories as you want to block with the policy. This allows you to block known and potential security threats on the public Internet.

​Content categories

When creating a DNS policy, you can select as many content categories as you want to block with the policy.

​Destinations

Setting a destination for a policy allows you to have manual control on what action to take on requests for specific domains. When setting a domain as a destination, you have the option to allow, block or override that domain.

• Allow. This action forces resolving this destination and all its sub-destinations, and takes precedence over any blocked destinations.
• Block. This action will block a destination and all its sub-destinations.
• Override. This action will forward all requests to a given destination to another destination you can set.

​Blocking a subdomain

When you manually block a domain, you automatically block all of its subdomains. For example, if you are blocking example.com, our policy engine will also block a.example.com, a.b.example.com.

If you only want to block a subdomain a.example.com, then instead of adding example.com to the list, you will add a.example.com. Note that once you add a.example.com to the block list, Cloudflare Gateway will also block all subdomains of a.example.com.

​Blocking a top-level domain

Just like you can choose to block a domain and all subdomains, you can block an entire top-level domain (TLD) by specifying it in a custom list. For example, if you wish to block all domains and subdomains registered as a .net, you would input net in a custom list with the Block action selected.

​Order of operations

When a DNS query matches with a DNS policy, Gateway follows this order of operations:

​HTTP policies

You can decide to add a policy to filter HTTP traffic on the L7 firewall. Gateway will intercept all HTTP and HTTPS traffic and apply the rules you have configured in your policy to either block, allow, or override specific elements such as websites, IP addresses, and file types.

You can build an HTTP policy by configuring the following elements:

• Actions
• Expressions
• Selectors
• Operators

​Actions

Just like actions on destinations in DNS policies, actions in HTTP policies allow you to choose what to do with a given set of elements (domains, IP addresses, file types, and so on). You can assign one action per policy.

These are the action types you can choose from:

• Allow
• Block
• Bypass

Bypass lets administrators bypass certain elements from inspection. Administrators who wish to bypass a site must match against the host in order to prevent HTTP inspection from occuring on both encrypted and plaintext traffic. The bypass action is only available when matching against the host criteria.

​Selectors

Gateway matches HTTP traffic against the following selectors, or criteria:

• Host
• URL
• URL Query
• URL Path
• URL Path and Query
• HTTP Method
• HTTP Response
• Uploaded and Downloaded File Extension
• Uploaded and Downloaded Mime Type
• Content categories

List of file extensions Gateway can match against:

​Operators

Operators are the way Gateway matches traffic to a selector. Matching happens as follows:

​Expressions

Expressions are sets of conditions with which you can combine selectors and operators. By configuring one or more expressions, you can define the scope of your HTTP policy.

​Example scenarios

Result: this configuration blocks any traffic to domains categorized as Gaming.

​FAQ

• How can I bypass the L7 firewall for a website?

Cloudflare Gateway uses the hostname in the HTTP CONNECT header to identify the destination of the request. Administrators who wish to bypass a site must match against the host in order to prevent HTTP inspection from occurring on both encrypted and plaintext traffic. The bypass action is only available when matching against the host criteria. Bypassing the L7 firewall results in no HTTP traffic inspection and logging is disabled for that HTTP session.

• In what order are rules evaluated?

The L7 firewall evaluates rules starting with the rule containing the lowest precedence (e.g., rule number one). Rules with a higher value precedence are evaluated after those with a lower value.