According to Check Point’s documentation you should let your SMS and Smart Dashboard clients get access to the internet freely without actually intercepting the traffic it self. There might be some cases where you wouldn’t like that idea too much and might still want to inspect it to restrict HTTPS connectivity of those hosts. After a bit of messing about, I managed to get IPS signature update through URL filtering working.

Basically when you try and update IPS signatures or have your Smart Dashboard try and connect to Check Point via URL filtering it will fail with errors relating to the certificates. In other words if you have followed the regular Check Point guidelines on setting up “App control/URL filter” and set the system to trust your gateway’s Certificate Authority, it will still fail. The reason behind it being the fact that Smart Dashboard client uses it’s own trust list not the system wide certificate store. The trust list file is located in “C:\Program Files (x86)\CheckPoint\SmartConsole\R77.30\PROGRAM\ca-bundle.crt” and when you add your own gateway’s CA certificate there after you have already started Smart Dashboard it will work until you restart Smart Dashboard. As I found out that file is actually being downloaded off the SMS every time Smart Dashboard starts up.

Fortunately the filename on the SMS is actually the same as it is in the SmartDashboard folder so when running the standard linux find command you see that there are quite a few instances of it:

/opt/CPsuite-R77/fw1/bin/ca-bundle.crt
/opt/CPinfo-10/bin/data/ca-bundle.crt
/opt/CPcvpn-R77/var/ssl/ca-bundle.crt
/opt/CPcvpn-R77/template/var/ssl/ca-bundle.crt
/opt/CPshrd-R77/database/downloads/CA_BUNDLE/1.0/1.0/ca-bundle.crt
/var/opt/CPsuite-R77/fw1/conf/SMC_Files/asm/ca-bundle.crt
/var/opt/CPshrd-R77/conf/ca-bundle.crt

Now make a backup of /var/opt/CPsuite-R77/fw1/conf/SMC_Files/asm/ca-bundle.crt and /var/opt/CPshrd-R77/conf/ca-bundle.crt files and your gateway’s CA certificate in PEM format to the end. After doing that restart Smart Dashboard and check if the ca-bundle file has your CA certificate in it and if communication to Check Point actually works.

Just as a reminder, the URL’s that need to be enabled for IPS signature to work can be found on CP support site here: https://supportcenter.checkpoint.com/supportcenter/portal?eventSubmit_doGoviewsolutiondetails=&solutionid=sk112635