Cisco Cisco Web Security Appliance S360 User Guide

118

I R O N P O R T   A S Y N C O S   6 . 3   F O R   W E B   U S E R   G U I D E  

WO R K I N G   W I T H   U S E R   A G E N T   B A S E D   PO L I C I E S

The Web Security appliance provides the means to create policies to define access to the web 
by the client application (user agent), such as a web browser, making the client request. You 
can define policy group membership based on user agents, and you can specify control 
settings based on user agents.

You might want to specify user agents to accomplish the following tasks:

• You can exempt certain user agents from authentication. You might want to do this for 

client applications that cannot handle prompting users for authentication credentials. For 
more information about how to do this, see “Exempting User Agents from Authentication” 
on page 120.

• You can block access from particular user agents that you define.

You can configure user agents in the following locations:

• Policy group membership for all policy types, including Identities.

• Application control settings for Access Policies.

Note — When the appliance is deployed in transparent mode, user agent information is not 
available for Decryption Policies.

When you define policy group membership for any policy type, you can expand the 
Advanced section to define membership by additional criteria, such as user agent. When you 
click the User Agents link, the Membership by User Agent page appears allowing you to 
define membership by user agent.

Figure 6-3 on page 119 shows the Membership by User Agent page for an Identity policy 
group.