Tag: CheckPoint

CheckPoint to Amazon AWS VPN connection issue

When trying to create a VPN tunnel between a CheckPoint firewall and Amazon managed VPN service I happened upon a unpleasant surprise.

Namely when using stronger crypto methods than defined by default in the guides by CheckPoint or Amazon you will run in to an issue, that the CheckPoint device will start dropping traffic after Phase2 key exchanges for a ~5 minute time period. To be more exact the traffic from Amazon to the hosts/networks behind the CheckPoint GW will start failing and connections started from behind the CheckPoint device will continue working as before. Namely Amazon VPN service refreshes it’s keys 5 minutes before the lifetime set in the VPN properties and CheckPoint close to 30 seconds. It actually wouldn’t be a problem if Amazon would use the same parameters as were used to initially establish the tunnel, but it doesn’t. It will actually use DH group 2 to initiate key exchange after which the CheckPoint device will start dropping the traffic coming in from the Amazon service with the following error:

encryption failure: Packet was decrypted with methods which are different from the methods according to the security policy - Gateway and Peer use different DH groups

After talking to both CheckPoint and Amazon support, I can say that the only thing you can do to remedy this is actually setting the DH group to 2  for PFS.

Although Amazon in its documentation(here) states it supports a bunch of different DH groups, and yet it defaults to DH group 2 when initiating the connection it self. To be honest, to me it seems a bit strange that the AWS VPN actually mirrors the encryption/integrity settings of the previous negotiation, but doesn’t remember the PFS settings and defaults to DH group 2. When talking to support services the only thing that AWS support suggested was to force the CheckPoint device to exchange keys before the AWS service does. Unfortunately you cannot do that according to Check Point support services, as there is no such setting available and that timer is around 30s+- some random number of seconds prior to the end of the life time set in the VPN properties.




Check Point IPS signature updates through URL filtering blade with HTTPS inspection enabled

According to Check Point’s documentation you should let your SMS and Smart Dashboard clients get access to the internet freely without actually intercepting the traffic it self. There might be some cases where you wouldn’t like that idea too much and might still want to inspect it to restrict HTTPS connectivity of those hosts. After a bit of messing about, I managed to get IPS signature update through URL filtering working.

Basically when you try and update IPS signatures or have your Smart Dashboard try and connect to Check Point via URL filtering it will fail with errors relating to the certificates. In other words if you have followed the regular Check Point guidelines on setting up “App control/URL filter” and set the system to trust your gateway’s Certificate Authority, it will still fail. The reason behind it being the fact that Smart Dashboard client uses it’s own trust list not the system wide certificate store. The trust list file is located in “C:\Program Files (x86)\CheckPoint\SmartConsole\R77.30\PROGRAM\ca-bundle.crt” and when you add your own gateway’s CA certificate there after you have already started Smart Dashboard it will work until you restart Smart Dashboard. As I found out that file is actually being downloaded off the SMS every time Smart Dashboard starts up.

Fortunately the filename on the SMS is actually the same as it is in the SmartDashboard folder so when running the standard linux find command you see that there are quite a few instances of it:


Now make a backup of /var/opt/CPsuite-R77/fw1/conf/SMC_Files/asm/ca-bundle.crt and /var/opt/CPshrd-R77/conf/ca-bundle.crt files and your gateway’s CA certificate in PEM format to the end. After doing that restart Smart Dashboard and check if the ca-bundle file has your CA certificate in it and if communication to Check Point actually works.

Just as a reminder, the URL’s that need to be enabled for IPS signature to work can be found on CP support site here: https://supportcenter.checkpoint.com/supportcenter/portal?eventSubmit_doGoviewsolutiondetails=&solutionid=sk112635

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