Sinkhole vs whitelising url

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Sinkhole vs whitelising url

L0 Member

Does the sinkhole take precedence over whitelisting? We whitelisted a url and are sinkholing parked categories. I can request to have the category changed, but was not sure which took precedence. 

1 accepted solution

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L6 Presenter

Sinkholing is a DNS action. URL filtering works on http/https connections.

When you try to visit a website, you have to resolve the FQDN (www.google.com) first. So DNS query happens first. Only after that a client (browser) knows where to send traffic (a http connection) to.

So whitelisting a URL doesn't help because the DNS query was blocked before there was any http/https connection.

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2 REPLIES 2

Community Team Member

Hi @gfleming,

 

That's an interesting question. Whitelisting a URL and Sinkhole fall under content inspection in the packet flow sequence in PAN-OS. Security profiles are checked through content inspection, but I cannot find a hard answer on which profiles are examined first. My first assumption would be starting at the top and going down. 

JayGolf_0-1660282116711.png

 

LIVEcommunity team member
Stay Secure,
Jay
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L6 Presenter

Sinkholing is a DNS action. URL filtering works on http/https connections.

When you try to visit a website, you have to resolve the FQDN (www.google.com) first. So DNS query happens first. Only after that a client (browser) knows where to send traffic (a http connection) to.

So whitelisting a URL doesn't help because the DNS query was blocked before there was any http/https connection.

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