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STATUS_IPSEC_AUTH_FIREWALL_DROP
A benign drop in authenticated-firewall handling
STATUS_IPSEC_AUTH_FIREWALL_DROP means that authenticated-firewall processing discarded an incoming ESP packet. The Windows NTSTATUS reference explicitly marks this drop as benign. That qualification matters: the result can appear in diagnostics without implying that the peer is malicious or that the IPsec tunnel is universally unusable.
The next step is context, not blanket suppression. Determine which authenticated-firewall policy or WFP layer handled the packet, whether the packet belonged to traffic that should be admitted, and whether the drop rate is exceptional. A repeating pattern for legitimate application traffic still points to a policy or selector mismatch even though an individual discarded packet is not a protocol-integrity failure.
What to verify
- Log the policy identity, traffic selectors, peer, direction, and packet rate.
- Compare permitted authenticated traffic with the filter that produced the event.
- Distinguish isolated expected control traffic from persistent application impact.
- Do not report this as a failed integrity check without a separate integrity status.
References
- Microsoft Open Specifications: NTSTATUS values
- Microsoft: configuring IPsec with WFP
- Microsoft: Windows Filtering Platform object model
- RFC 4301: Security Architecture for IP
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