With the older Cisco PIX firewall appliances, there was no way for traffic to enter a specific interface and then exit back from the same interface again. With the new Cisco ASA models, this is also not supported by default, but you can enable this functionality with the same-security-traffic permit intra-interface command.

Permit same security traffic intra interface

The schematic above shows a possible scenario where this functionality can be used. All internal hosts in network 10.0.0.0/24 have the ASA as default gateway (10.0.0.254) in order to access the Internet. However, there is another internal network range (Branch Office: 192.168.10.0/24) which is accessible via a cisco router at 10.0.0.253. In order for the internal hosts to access this subnet, a static route must be configured on the ASA together with the “permit intra-interface” command, as shown below:

ciscoasa(config)# route inside 192.168.10.0 255.255.255.0 10.0.0.253 1
ciscoasa(config)# same-security-traffic permit intra-interface

All traffic from internal hosts destined to subnet 192.168.10.0 will be redirected by the ASA firewall through the Cisco router. The feature above is supported in versions 7.2(1) and later.