Web Gateway 7.1.5 Product Guide - McAfee

Authentication and access management
Filtering users 5
Sample authentication rule
In the following, an example of an authentication rule is explained. This rule can be included in a rule
set of the appliance library. It is shown in a notation that comes close to how the rule appears on the
user interface.
Name
Authenticate with User Database
Criteria Action
Authentication.Authenticate equals false –> Authenticate
In plain text, this rule could be rephrased as follows:
If the user has not yet been authenticated (through information from the user database), ask this
user to submit credentials for authentication.
Criteria and action
The structure of the rule is the same as for all other rules on the appliance. It has two main elements,
the criteria and the action.
If the criteria is matched, the action is taken. The user is not authenticated – if this is matched, the
Authenticate action is taken.
The criteria has three elements:
Property Operator Value of the property
Authentication.Authenticate equals false
The meaning of the Authentication.Authenticate property could be rendered as “having been
authenticated”. The criteria could then be rephrased as follows:
Having been authenticated is false (for the user who sent the request).
Property
A property is something related to a web object or a user. In this rule, “having been authenticated” is a
property of the user who sent a request.
Property names usually have two or more parts. For the Authentication.Authenticate property, the
Authentication indicates that the property has something to do with authentication in general. The
Authenticate part denotes a particular aspect of authentication like “having been authenticated”.
Settings
The sample rule also contains two terms in angle brackets: and .
Terms in angle brackets are alway settings in rules on the appliance. The settings
appear next to the property Authentication.Authenticate. They are the settings of the module that this
property relies on for being assigned a value.
The authentication module retrieves information from a database to let the rule know that
Authentication.Authenticate (“being authenticated”) has the value false for a given user.
The module settings are in this rule, which means the module is to retrieve user
information from the local user database.
The rule action, which is Authenticate, has as its settings. Settings of an action are mainly
for specifying a particular message that is sent to users who are affected by the action.
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