Forcepoint NGFW Response Integration via API

Purpose

This guide explains how to configure Logsign's Forcepoint NGFW Response integration, one of the automated/manual action integrations available under Settings > Integrations > Responses. Response integrations let an Incident or Alarm in Logsign trigger an action on a third-party product, either automatically through an action rule or manually from the incident screen. For Forcepoint NGFW, the available actions are blocking and unblocking an IP address on the firewall side.

This is a different product from the "Forcepoint" data collection integration already documented separately (Product/Custom/Forcepoint/Forcepoint-Integration-via-API.html), which pulls proxy/web filtering logs from Forcepoint Web Security Cloud. That is a poller: it reads logs. This document covers a Response integration: it writes changes to Forcepoint NGFW, specifically to the Security Management Center (SMC), the on-premises management server that administers Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall engines. The two integrations use unrelated APIs, unrelated credentials, and are configured in different parts of the Logsign UI (Settings > Sources for the poller, Settings > Integrations > Responses for this one). If your goal is to collect NGFW firewall logs into Logsign rather than to block IPs from Logsign, this is not the document you want; as of this writing no log-collection poller for Forcepoint NGFW exists in Logsign.

Reading the integration's Go source (automation/integration/forcepoint_ngfw/) and its UI manifest (forcepoint_ngfw.manifest) confirms the integration talks to the SMC's REST API (the "SMC API"), not directly to an individual NGFW engine. It authenticates as an SMC API Client, then reads and rewrites the membership of an IP List element that your NGFW policy references. It does not create firewall rules, does not talk to the Blacklist/blacklisting feature of SMC, and does not manage anything beyond that one element type.

Prerequisites

• A Forcepoint NGFW deployment managed by a Security Management Center (SMC), with the SMC API enabled on the Management Server. Forcepoint's SMC API documentation states the API is off by default and must be turned on per Management Server before any client, Logsign included, can reach it.
• Network reachability from the Logsign server to the SMC Management Server's API port. The SMC API defaults to port 8082 per Forcepoint's official documentation, but this is configurable during setup, so confirm the actual port with whoever administers your SMC.
• At least one "IP address list" (IP List) element already defined in SMC, and referenced by the Access or NAT rule you intend to use for blocking. Logsign only edits the membership of this element; it does not create the element or wire it into a policy for you. If the list isn't already used by an active rule, adding an address to it has no effect on traffic.
• Use least privilege. Do not authenticate this integration as an SMC superuser or an unrestricted API Client. Create a dedicated API Client element (Step 1 below) and set its permissions to Restricted rather than Unrestricted. Forcepoint's own SMC API documentation recommends, as a baseline, Viewer rights on "All Simple Elements", and on top of that this integration specifically needs Editor (or Owner) rights on the one or more IP List elements it will be writing to. Nothing beyond that is required: no engine management rights, no policy upload rights, no rights over other element types.

Step 1: Generate SMC API credentials

1. In the SMC Management Client, confirm the SMC API is enabled on the Management Server (its own Properties, SMC API settings). This step is normally done once by whoever manages the SMC installation; if it is already enabled, skip to the next step.
2. Go to Configuration > Administration > Access Rights.
3. Right-click and choose New > API Client.
4. Give the client a distinct Name, for example logsign-response, so it is identifiable later in audit logs and permission reviews.
5. Use the initial authentication key SMC generates, or click Generate Authentication Key for a new one. The key is shown only once. Copy it immediately; you will paste it into Logsign in Step 2 and cannot retrieve it again from SMC afterward. If it is lost, generate a new one and update the Logsign configuration to match.
6. Open the Permissions tab on the new API Client element. Select Restricted access rather than Unrestricted. Grant Viewer on All Simple Elements as a baseline, then add Editor (or Owner) specifically on the IP List element(s) this integration will manage. Do not grant Editor or Owner broadly across all elements if you can scope it to just the list(s) in question.
7. Save the API Client element.
8. Note your SMC's installed major/minor version (Help > About in the Management Client, or ask your Forcepoint administrator). You will need to pick the matching version in Logsign's configuration; a mismatch changes the API's URL path and produces request failures.

This authentication key is the only credential this integration uses. There is no separate username, OAuth client, or certificate exchange involved on the Forcepoint side.

Step 2: Configure the integration in Logsign

1. In Logsign, go to Settings > Integrations > Responses.
2. Search for Forcepoint NGFW.
3. Click Configure, then +Device.
4. Fill in the fields below, then click Create.

On save, Logsign builds a base URL of the form protocol://host:port/version (for example https://smc.internal.example.com:8082/7.0) and, on every method call, first logs in against /login using the stored authentication key to obtain a session cookie, then issues the requested request with that cookie. A fresh login happens on each action invocation rather than a session being cached and reused, so a revoked or expired key is caught on the very next action rather than causing a silent long-running failure, at the cost of one extra login round trip per action.

Available Methods

Get List Ids

Category: investigation. Returns the IP List elements currently defined in SMC (their display name and internal list ID). This has no input parameters of its own; it exists mainly to populate the "List" dropdown shown when configuring the Block IP and Unblock IP actions below, but it can also be run on its own if you simply want to see which IP List elements are visible to this API Client.

Block IP

Category: change (Containment). Adds an IP address to the selected IP List element in SMC. Can be wired into an alarm's action rule for automatic blocking, or triggered manually from an incident.

Logsign reads the current membership of the selected list, checks whether the address is already present (if so, the action fails with an "already exists" error rather than silently succeeding), appends the new address, and writes the entire updated member list back to SMC in one request. This is a full replace of the element's membership, not an "add one item" API call. Two blocks racing against the same list at nearly the same time could in principle overwrite each other; this has not been independently tested. Also, because expiry is enforced by Logsign scheduling a later Unblock IP call rather than by a native SMC expiration on the list entry itself, if Logsign or its automation engine is down when an expiry is due, the unblock will fire once it is back rather than at the exact scheduled time.

Adding an address to the list only changes the SMC element. It has no effect at the firewall until an NGFW policy that references this list is active and current on the relevant engines, which is a Forcepoint-side configuration outside Logsign's control (see Prerequisites). Whether an update to list membership takes effect immediately on already-deployed policy or requires a manual policy refresh/upload has not been independently verified; confirm this with your Forcepoint administrator or test it in a non-production environment before relying on it for real-time blocking.

Unblock IP

Category: change (Recovery). Removes an IP address from the selected IP List element. This is the counterpart to Block IP and runs automatically when a block's Expire Time elapses. The manifest marks this method's action rule disabled, which in practice means it is not offered as something you pick directly when building a new alarm action rule; it is reached either through the automatic expiry of a prior Block IP, or by manually reversing an existing block from within the incident it was triggered from. This reading is based on the manifest field name and has not been separately confirmed against the live Logsign UI.

If the address is not currently a member of the selected list, Logsign returns an error rather than treating it as a no-op success.

Notes and Limits

• This integration manages a static "IP address list" element in SMC. It is unrelated to SMC's own native Blacklist/blacklisting feature, which has its own dedicated endpoints and its own built-in expiration handling on the Forcepoint side. Logsign's Expire Time option is enforced by Logsign, not by SMC.
• Only IP block/unblock is implemented. There is no domain, URL, or hash blocking action for Forcepoint NGFW in this integration; if you need those, check whether a different Response integration in Logsign covers them for your other security products.
• The integration authenticates fresh on every method invocation rather than reusing a cached session, so there is no session-timeout failure mode to plan around, but this also means every single action does one extra login call to the SMC before doing its real work.
• There is no built-in retry or backoff in the integration's code. A failed call to SMC (network error, permission error, bad request) surfaces immediately as a failed action; Logsign's own action rule/incident retry behavior, if any, governs what happens next.
• The underlying Go configuration struct also defines an optional outbound proxy URL field, but this field does not appear in the current UI manifest (the form fields documented above are the complete set exposed in Settings > Integrations > Responses). Whether proxying is configurable through any other part of the Logsign UI has not been independently verified.
• Insecure Skip Verify defaults to enabled, meaning TLS certificate validation against the SMC API endpoint is off by default. This matches typical on-premises SMC deployments that use a self-signed certificate, but if your organization requires certificate validation, review this setting with your Logsign administrator.

Troubleshooting