Enabling Ping and Traceroute on the Cisco ASA 5505

Today I found some time to sit down and figure out why my ASA box was denying ping, traceroute and other ICMP traffic. Denying all ICMP traffic is the most secure option, and I think Cisco made a good choice by making this the default. However, I really wanted to be able to ping and traceroute from inside my network to the outside world, if for no other reason than to check the latency of my servers. Here’s how to do it in ASDM.

First, open an ASDM connection to your router. Go into the Configuration screens and click on Firewall to configure the firewall options. Then click on Service Policy Rules to configure the services that the firewall software will monitor. Select the global policy (first and only one in the list), and click on the Edit button. Switch to the Rule Actions (3rd) tab, and in the list check to enable ICMP. You can leave ICMP Error unchecked. Close that and Apply the changes.

Now, if you just want to be able to ping, stop here and you are done. However, traceroute will not work with this setup. For traceroute to work, you have to complete this follow-up task.

While still under the Firewall configuration switch to the Access Rules item. Add an access rule to permit ICMP traffic. Click the Add button, make sure the interface is set to outside, action is Permit, and Source/Destination is any. Under Service, click the … button and select the icmp line and click OK. Click OK again in the Add Access Rule dialog and Apply the results to finish the process.