Policy Types
Focus
Focus

Policy Types

Table of Contents
End-of-Life (EoL)

Policy Types

The Palo Alto Networks next-generation firewall supports a variety of policy types that work together to safely enable applications on your network.
It is important to understand that the set of IPv4 addresses is treated as a subset of the set of IPv6 addresses, as described in detail in Policy.
For all policy types, when you Enforce Policy Rule Description, Tag, and Audit Comment, you can use the audit comment archive to view how a policy rule changed over time. The archive, which includes the audit comment history and the configuration logs, enables you to compare configuration versions and review who created or modified and why.
Policy Type
Description
Security
Determine whether to block or allow a session based on traffic attributes such as the source and destination security zone, the source and destination IP address, the application, user, and the service. For more details, see Security Policy.
NAT
Instruct the firewall which packets need translation and how to do the translation. The firewall supports both source address and/or port translation and destination address and/or port translation. For more details, see NAT.
QoS
Identify traffic requiring QoS treatment (either preferential treatment or bandwidth-limiting) using a defined parameter or multiple parameters and assign it a class. For more details, see Quality of Service.
Policy Based Forwarding
Identify traffic that should use a different egress interface than the one that would normally be used based on the routing table. For more details, see Policy-Based Forwarding.
Decryption
Identify encrypted traffic that you want to inspect for visibility, control, and granular security. For more details, see Decryption.
Application Override
Identify sessions that you want to bypass App-ID layer 7 processing and threat inspection. Traffic that matches an application override policy forces the firewall to handle the session as a stateful inspection firewall at layer 4. Only use Application Override when you must and in the most highly trusted environments where you can apply the principle of least privilege strictly. For more details, see Application Override.
Authentication
Identify traffic that requires users to authenticate. For more details, see Authentication Policy.
DoS Protection
Identify potential denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and take protective action in response to rule matches. For more details, see DoS Protection Profiles.