Endpoint Protection

Does anyone know of a method that can be used to export the content of a firewall policy, or at least the ruleset, from the SEPM console into a plain text format? Ideally something human-readable or a parsable XML? This is for an audit requirement where administrators are supposed to provide the auditors with copies of their firewall rulesets, but the auditors do not have access to the SEPM console itself. It seems that the "export" feature creates a .DAT file that can only be read importing it back in to the management console. Any ideas for another way to solve this problem? Thanks,

I think you can use the dat viewer for that and then you can read the policy contents

The DAT viewer is an internal tool we use in Support and it's not publicly available.

As for exporting/extracting the rules, I'm not aware of anything.

If they're internal auditors. Give them Read-Only access. But their view is limited.

Or, Take screenshots of the FW policy page.

Or. Setup another SEPM server for auditors only. Where they can import rules for viewing. And that's the only thing it will do. Preferably on a stand alone machine.

You can search the internet and you can find the many dat viewer software's available

you need to change the.dat  to .zip and then extract , you will find the main.xml

try this

How to see the contents of an exported Policy

1. Export the policy to a file sample.dat

2. rename the sample.dat file to sample.zip

3. unzip the file. File contains a file named main.xml

Tried this on all the available policy types from Antivirus and Antispyware policy.

Yup, renaming the dat to zip shows an xml file inside.

The problem is that I can barely understand it's contents. A lot of hex or hash values.

Call support and check with them, if they can share dat viewer with you or not.