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rhap4boy
Visitor III
October 5, 2023
Solved

One-Armed Sniffer and SSL Inspection

What feature is supported for One-armed Sniffer?  Is SSL certificate inspection supported? Is SSL deep inspection supported?

spoojary
spoojaryAnswer
Staff
October 5, 2023

A one-armed sniffer on a FortiGate is primarily used to passively monitor and capture traffic for diagnostic purposes. It's a passive monitoring tool that doesn't interact with the traffic it captures. When an interface is in sniffer mode, it won't participate in routing, switching, or any security processing.

Given that:

  1. SSL Certificate Inspection: This is a type of SSL inspection where the FortiGate checks the certificate of the SSL/TLS traffic against its local certificate store to ensure its validity. This doesn't decrypt the actual payload/content of the SSL/TLS session.

  2. SSL Deep Inspection: This is a more intrusive type of SSL inspection where the FortiGate acts as a man-in-the-middle, decrypting SSL/TLS traffic to inspect the content, then re-encrypting it to send to the final destination. This allows the FortiGate to check the content for any threats or compliance violations.

In the context of a one-armed sniffer:

  • SSL Certificate Inspection: Not applicable, as the one-armed sniffer just captures traffic. It doesn't perform any kind of security inspection, including SSL certificate checks.

  • SSL Deep Inspection: Again, not applicable for the same reasons. A one-armed sniffer doesn't decrypt or inspect traffic. It only captures it.

If you need to perform SSL Certificate or Deep Inspection, you'll need to set up the FortiGate in a mode where it can actively process and potentially modify the traffic (i.e., not in a one-armed sniffer setup). This usually involves placing the FortiGate inline, where it can intercept and inspect the traffic as it passes through.

2 replies

spoojary
Staff
spoojaryAnswer
Staff
October 5, 2023

A one-armed sniffer on a FortiGate is primarily used to passively monitor and capture traffic for diagnostic purposes. It's a passive monitoring tool that doesn't interact with the traffic it captures. When an interface is in sniffer mode, it won't participate in routing, switching, or any security processing.

Given that:

  1. SSL Certificate Inspection: This is a type of SSL inspection where the FortiGate checks the certificate of the SSL/TLS traffic against its local certificate store to ensure its validity. This doesn't decrypt the actual payload/content of the SSL/TLS session.

  2. SSL Deep Inspection: This is a more intrusive type of SSL inspection where the FortiGate acts as a man-in-the-middle, decrypting SSL/TLS traffic to inspect the content, then re-encrypting it to send to the final destination. This allows the FortiGate to check the content for any threats or compliance violations.

In the context of a one-armed sniffer:

  • SSL Certificate Inspection: Not applicable, as the one-armed sniffer just captures traffic. It doesn't perform any kind of security inspection, including SSL certificate checks.

  • SSL Deep Inspection: Again, not applicable for the same reasons. A one-armed sniffer doesn't decrypt or inspect traffic. It only captures it.

If you need to perform SSL Certificate or Deep Inspection, you'll need to set up the FortiGate in a mode where it can actively process and potentially modify the traffic (i.e., not in a one-armed sniffer setup). This usually involves placing the FortiGate inline, where it can intercept and inspect the traffic as it passes through.

rhap4boy
rhap4boyAuthor
Visitor III
October 11, 2023

Thank you!

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