Network policies

With Cloudflare Zero Trust, you can configure policies to control network-level traffic leaving your endpoints. Using network selectors like IP addresses and ports, your policies will control access to any network origin. Because Cloudflare Zero Trust integrates with your identity provider , it also gives you the ability to create identity-based network policies. This means you can now control access to non-HTTP resources on a per-user basis regardless of where they are or what device they’re accessing that resource from.

Build a network policy by configuring the following elements:

• Actions
• Expressions
• Selectors
• Operators

​​ Actions

Just like actions in DNS and HTTP policies, actions in network policies define which decision you want to apply to a given set of elements. You can assign one action per policy.

These are the action types you can choose from:

• Allow
• Block
• Network Override

​​ Allow

Policies with Allow actions allow network traffic to reach certain IPs or ports. For example, the following configuration allows specific users to reach a given IP address:

​​ Block

Policies with Block actions block network traffic from reaching certain IPs or ports. For example, the following configuration blocks all traffic directed to port 443:

​​ Network Override

Policies with Network Override actions do not inspect traffic directed to, or coming from, certain IPs or ports. For example, the following configuration overrides traffic to a public IP to a Private IP based on a user’s identity:

​​ Expressions

Build expressions to determine the set of elements you want to impact with your policy. To build an expression, you need to choose a Selector and an Operator, and enter a value or range of values in the Value field.

​​ Selectors

Gateway matches network traffic against the following selectors, or criteria.

​​ Identity-based selectors

You can build Network policies using identity-based selectors. These selectors require Gateway with WARP mode to be enabled in the Zero Trust WARP client and the user to be enrolled in the organization via the WARP client. For a list of identity-based selectors and API examples, please refer to the dedicated section .

​​ Destination IP

The IP address of the request’s target.

​​ Destination Port

The port number of the request’s target.

​​ Protocol

The protocol used to send the packet.

​​ Source IP

The IP address of the user making the request.

​​ Source Port

The IP address of the user making the request.

​​ SNI

The host whose Server Name Indication (SNI) header Gateway will filter traffic against. This will allow for an exact match.

​​ SNI Domain

The domain whose Server Name Indication (SNI) header Gateway will filter traffic against. This will match against the hostname and sub-domains.

​​ Device Posture

With the Device Posture selector, admins can use signals from end-user devices to secure access to their internal and external resources. For example, a security admin can choose to limit all access to internal applications based on whether specific software is installed on a device, and/or if the device or software are configured in a particular way.

​​ Operators

Operators are the way Gateway matches traffic to a selector. Matching happens as follows:

​​ Changing network protocol

You can set your protocol preferences in the Protocol card under Settings > Network.