Concepts

You can control network traffic generally by the source or destination address, or by the port, the quantity or similar attributes of the traffic itself in the security policy. If you want to control the flow of traffic from a specific application, these methods may not be sufficient to precisely define the traffic. To address this problem, the application control feature examines the traffic itself for signatures unique to the application generating it. Application control does not require knowledge of any server addresses or ports. The FortiGate unit includes signatures for over 2,000 applications, services, and protocols.

Updated and new application signatures are delivered to your FortiGate unit as part of your FortiGuard Application Control Service subscription, which is a free service. Fortinet is constantly increasing the number of applications that this feature can detect by adding applications to the FortiGuard Application Control Database. Because intrusion protection protocol decoders are used for application control, the application control database is part of the FortiGuard Intrusion Protection System Database. Both of these databases have the same version number.

You can find the version of the application control database installed on your unit by going to the Licenses widget on the Dashboard and hovering over the IPS& Application Control line; the status, expiry date, and version will be displayed.

To see the complete list of applications supported by FortiGuard Application Control go to the FortiGuard site or http://fortiguard.com/appcontrol. This web page lists all of the supported applications. You can select any application name to see details about the application.