CR202_How to set up Filtering feature

CR202_How to set up Filtering feature

Website filtering is a way to control which online resources can be accessed through your network. With Filtering function on CR202, we can achieve whitelist or blacklist for refined internet traffic control.

In real-world scenarios, modern websites often rely on multiple domains (such as content delivery networks, analytics services, or third-party APIs). As a result, simply allowing or blocking a single domain is often not sufficient. Understanding which domains are actually accessed when opening a website is essential for building an effective whitelist or blacklist and maintaining it over time.

Here are the steps to analyze domains and set up whitelist filtering. 

How to Identify Required Domains for a Website

1. Go to Tools → Traffic Analysis.

2. Set Type to Domain Only.

3. Click Start Analysis.

4. Open the target website in a web browser while the analysis is running.

5. Once finished, Download the Analysis File.
6. From the download .csv file, you can find all the domains that were accessed by the browser:

How to import a whitelist to Filtering page

1. Go to Firewall=>Filtering. Click on Back up to download a template.
2. Edit the template with the results from Traffic Analysis.
3. Click on Import to upload the list.

How to block all traffic except the URLs from the whitelist

1. Go to Firewall=>Basic. The Default Filter Policy is Accept from the factory, which allows all traffic. If we want to restrict traffic and allow URLs on the whitelist only, please set Default Filter Policy to Block. Now, only the URLs in the whitelist at Filtering page can have access to the network.


Tips:

At Firewall=>Filtering page, the wild card(*.abc.com) is supported. 

What *.abc.com Includes:

The rule *.abc.com matches all subdomains under abc.com, such as:
• www.abc.com
• api.abc.com
• login.abc.com
• images.abc.com
• cdn.us-east.abc.com

In general, any domain that ends with .abc.com and has at least one label in front of it will be included.
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What *.abc.com Does NOT Include:

It’s important to understand the limitations:
• ❌ abc.com (the root domain itself is not matched)
• ❌ abc.net, abc.org, or other TLDs
• ❌ abc.com.cn or abc.co.uk
• ❌ xyzabc.com (different domain, even if it contains the same string)