Geolocation objects (original) (raw)

Geolocation objects in the firewall policy rules let you filter external IPv4 and external IPv6 traffic based on specific geographic locations or regions.

You can apply rules with geolocation objects to ingress and egress traffic. Based on the direction of the traffic, the IP addresses associated with the country codes are matched against the source or destination of the traffic.

Specifications

The following firewall specifications apply to geolocation objects:

• You can configure geolocation objects for hierarchical firewall policies, global network firewall policies, and regional network firewall policies.
• To add geolocations to the firewall policy rules, use the two-letter country or region codes as defined in the ISO 3166 alpha-2 country codes.
  For example, if you want to allow incoming traffic only from the US into the network, create an ingress firewall policy rule with the source country code set to US and the action set to allow. Similarly, if you want to allow outbound traffic only to the US, configure an egress firewall policy rule with the destination country code set to US and the action set to allow.
• Cloud NGFW lets you configure firewall rules for the following territories subject to comprehensive US sanctions:

  Territories	Assigned code
  Crimea	XC
  So-Called Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic	XD

• If there are any duplicate country codes included in a single firewall rule, only one entry for that country code is retained. The duplicate entry is removed. For example, in the country code list ca,us,us, only ca,us is retained.
• Google maintains a database with IP addresses and country code mappings. Google Cloud firewalls use this database to map the IP addresses of source and destination traffic to the country code, and then apply the matching firewall policy rule with geolocation objects.
• Sometimes, IP address assignments and country codes change due to the following conditions:
  • IP address movement across geographic locations
  • Updates to the ISO 3166 alpha-2 country codesstandard
    Because it takes some time for these changes to be reflected in Google's database, you might see some traffic disruptions and changes in behavior for certain traffic being blocked or allowed.

Geolocation objects matching for internal IP addresses

Geolocation objects are designed to apply to external IP addresses. Geolocation objects don't apply to the private internal IP addresses shown in the following table:

However, geolocation objects firewall policy rules do apply to internal IP addresses if they are privately used public IP addresses. Even though these addresses are internal to the VPC network, they are public addresses and are matched against geolocation objects. To prevent communication issues when you use privately used public IP addresses, create higher priority firewall policy rules that allow traffic to or from the privately used public IP address ranges.

Use geolocation objects with other firewall policy rule filters

You can use geolocation objects along with other source or destination filters. Depending on the rule direction, the firewall policy rule is applied to the incoming or outgoing traffic that matches the union of all the specified filters.

For information about how geolocation objects work with other source filters in the ingress rules, see Sources for ingress rules.

For information about how geolocation objects work with other destination filters in the egress rules, see Destinations for egress rules.

What's next

• Configure global network firewall policy to deny egress connections to specific geolocations