156-115.77 · Question #309
Which item below in a Security Policy would be enforced first?
The correct answer is D. IP spoofing/IP options. See the full explanation below for the reasoning.
Question
Which item below in a Security Policy would be enforced first?
Options
- ANetwork Address Translation
- BSecurity Policy First rule
- CAdministrator-defined Rule Base
- DIP spoofing/IP options
How the community answered
(41 responses)- A12% (5)
- B7% (3)
- C2% (1)
- D78% (32)
Community Discussion
9
Hiroshi T.Jun 25, 2026The correct answer is D, IP spoofing and IP options. Check Point's packet processing pipeline runs sanity and anti-spoofing checks against the IP header before it ever hands the packet off to the Rule Base engine, which means those checks fire regardless of what the administrator has written in the policy. NAT (A) and the administrator-defined Rule Base (C) both come later in the processing chain, and the "Security Policy First rule" in option B is a concept within the Rule Base itself, so it is already downstream of the IP-level checks. The Check Point R81 Security Gateway Technical Administration guide and the R81 Firewall Administration guide both document this processing order explicitly, so go to those sources rather than relying on forum summaries if you need the authoritative sequence for the exam.
Toby R.Jun 21, 2026D is right, IP spoofing checks happen before anything else in the policy engine.
Hiroshi T.Jun 24, 2026That ordering holds for uRPF-based checks at the ingress interface, but several vendor platforms (Palo Alto and Cisco ASA among them) document zone assignment and initial packet classification as occurring before anti-spoof validation in the processing pipeline, so "before anything else" is too absolute without specifying the platform and its published packet flow diagram.
Brenda K.Jun 5, 2026D is dead right, and you should know this cold before exam day because they love testing enforcement order. IP spoofing and IP options checks happen at the kernel level before the daemon even touches your Rule Base, so no policy rule you write can override that sanity check.
Hiroshi T.Jun 7, 2026Correct on the mechanics, and worth adding the precise exam angle: per the R81.x Security Management Administration Guide, anti-spoofing is a topology-based property set on each interface object, which is why no explicit Allow rule in the Rule Base can override it, and that distinction between interface-level enforcement and policy-level enforcement is exactly the kind of detail the blueprint item on "Check Point Security Gateway packet flow" tends to test directly.
Bahar F.Jun 8, 2026D is correct, spoofing checks run before the Rule Base even loads.
Hiroshi T.Jun 10, 2026The order is right per the official Check Point documentation on packet flow, but the phrasing is a little loose: the Rule Base is already loaded into the kernel at policy installation, so the more precise statement is that anti-spoofing validation happens before the Rule Base is consulted, not before it loads.
Samuel O.Jun 15, 2026NAT has to happen before the rule base even looks at a packet, because the gateway needs to resolve the real destination address before it can match traffic against any policy, and that is exactly why A makes the most sense to me coming from years of watching firewall logs where the translated address is what shows up in the connection table from the jump.
Hiroshi T.Jun 16, 2026Samuel, the Check Point Security Administration documentation specifies that the rule base is evaluated against the original pre-translation addresses first, and NAT is applied afterward in the packet processing chain, which is why D is correct. The translated address appearing in the connection table is a result of NAT running after the policy match, not before it.