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Policies

​​ What is the order of policy enforcement?

Gateway and Access policies generally trigger from top to bottom based on their position in the policy table in the UI. Exceptions include Bypass and Service Auth policies, which Access evaluates first. Similarly, for Gateway HTTP policies, Do Not Inspect and Isolate policies take precedence over all Allow or Block policies. To learn more about order of enforcement, refer to our documentation for Access policies and Gateway policies.

​​ How can I bypass the L7 firewall for a website?

Cloudflare Gateway uses the hostname in the HTTP CONNECT header to identify the destination of the request. Administrators who wish to bypass a site must create a Do Not Inspect policy in order to prevent HTTP inspection from occurring on both encrypted and plaintext traffic.

Bypassing the L7 firewall results in no HTTP traffic inspection, and logging is disabled for that HTTP session.

If you have enabled the WARP client and are sending requests through Gateway, you need to disable the QUIC protocol within Google Chrome. This will prevent you from encountering issues such as users who are able to connect to Google-related sites and services (like YouTube) that are explicitly blocked by a Gateway policy.

Google Chrome uses QUIC to connect to all Google services by default. This means all requests to Google services via the Google Chrome browser use UDP instead of TCP. At this time, Gateway does not support inspection of QUIC traffic, and requests using QUIC will bypass Gateway HTTP policies. Gateway does prevent standard HTTP requests from negotiating to using QUIC with the Alt-Svc header by removing this header from HTTP requests.

Gateway will support inspection of QUIC traffic in the future.

​​ Can I secure applications with a second-level subdomain URL?

Yes. Ensure that your SSL certificates cover the first- and second-level subdomain. Most certificates only cover the first-level subdomain and not the second. This is true for most Cloudflare certificates. To cover a second-level subdomain with a CF certificate, create an advanced certificate.

Wildcard-based policies in Cloudflare Access only cover the level where they are applied. Add the wildcard policy to the left-most subdomain to be covered.

​​ How do isolation policies work together with HTTP policies?

Isolation policies, like all HTTP policies, are evaluated in stages. When a user makes a request which evaluates an Isolation policy, the request will be rerouted to an isolated browser and re-evaluated for HTTP policies. This makes it possible for an isolated browser to remotely render a block page, or have malicious content within the isolated browser blocked by HTTP policies.

​​ Why is API or CLI traffic not isolated?

Isolation policies are applied to requests that include Accept: text/html*. This allows Browser Isolation policies to co-exist with API and command line requests.

​​ Can Access enforce policies on a specific nonstandard port?

No. Cloudflare Access cannot enforce a policy that would contain a port appended to the URL. However, you can use Cloudflare Tunnel to point traffic to non-standard ports. For example, if Jira is available at port 8443 on your origin, you can proxy traffic to that port via Cloudflare Tunnel.

​​ Why can I still reach domains blocked by a DNS policy?

Here is a list of possible causes:

  • Your policy is still being updated. After you edit or create a policy, Cloudflare updates the new setting across all of our data centers around the world. It takes about 60 seconds for the change to propagate.

  • Your device is using another DNS resolver. If you have other DNS resolvers in your DNS settings, your device could be using IP addresses for resolvers that are not part of Gateway. As a result, the domain you are trying to block is still accessible from your device. Make sure to remove all other IP addresses from your DNS settings and only include Gateway’s DNS resolver IP addresses.

  • Your policy is not assigned to a location. If your policy is not assigned to a location and you send a DNS query from that location, Gateway will not apply that policy. Assign a policy to a location to make sure the desired policy is applied when you send a DNS query from that location.

  • Your DoH endpoint is not a Gateway location. Browsers can be configured to use any DoH endpoint. If you chose to configure DoH directly in your browser, make sure that the DoH endpoint is a Gateway location.

​​ What is policy 5ca54fe7-c825-44b6-a464-873b685fe735?

This policy disables inspection on requests to the *.cloudflareclient.com API, ensuring that users cannot accidentally block themselves from making account changes. Refer to the Global rules page for a list of all default policies.