SonicOS 7.1 Objects

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Technical Documentation > SonicOS 7.1 Objects > Zones > How Zones Work

How Zones Work

An easy way to visualize how security zones work is to imagine a large new building, with several rooms inside the building, and a group of new employees that do not know their way around the building. This building has one or more exits, which can be thought of as the WAN interfaces. The rooms within the building have one or more doors, which can be thought of as interfaces. These rooms can be thought of as zones inside each room are a number of people. The people are categorized and assigned to separate rooms within the building. People in each room going to another room or leaving the building, must talk to a door person on the way out of each room. This door person is the inter-zone/intra-zone security policy, and the door person’s job to consult a list and make sure that the person is allowed to go to the other room, or to leave the building. If the person is allowed (for example, the security policy allows them in), they can leave the room through the door (the interface).

Upon entering the hallway, the person needs to consult with the hallway monitor to find out where the room is, or where the door out of the building is located. This hallway monitor provides the routing process because the monitor knows where all the rooms are located, and how to get in and out of the building. The monitor also knows the addresses of any of the remote offices, which can be considered the VPNs. If the building has more than one entrance/exit (WAN interfaces), the hallway monitor can direct people to use the secondary entrance/exit, depending upon how they have been told to do so (for example, only in an emergency, or to distribute the traffic in and out of the entrance/exits). This function can be thought of as WAN Load Balancing.

There are times that the rooms inside the building have more than one door, and times when there are groups of people in the room who are not familiar with one another. In this example, one group of people uses only one door, and another group uses the other door, even though groups are all in the same room. Because they also do not recognize each other, in order to speak with someone in another group, the users must ask the door person (the security policy) to point out which person in the other group is the one with whom they wish to speak. The door person has the option to not let one group of people talk to the other groups in the room. This is an example of when zones have more than one interface bound to them, and when intra-zone traffic is not allowed.

Sometimes, people want to visit remote offices, and people might arrive from remote offices to visit people in specific rooms in the building. These are the VPN tunnels. The hallway and doorway monitors check to see if this is allowed or not, and allow traffic through. The door person can also elect to force people to put on a costume before traveling to another room, or to exit, or to another remote office. This hides the true identity of the person, masquerading the person as someone else. This process can be thought of as the NAT policy.

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