System and method to configure a firewall for access to a captive network

A system to support dynamic firewall configuration for Internet access through a captive network, comprising:

• a network appliance serving as an VPN gateway of a protected network and configured to
• create and utilize one or more templates to identify a set of commonly-used captive portals to allow only URL requests from one or more devices in the protected network to access;
• add one or more firewall rules to allow network traffic from the one or more devices in the protected network to be automatically routed to one of the commonly-used captive portals once the captive portals are identified;
• redirect users of the one or more devices in the protected network attempting to access Internet via the devices to the captive portal;
• establish a VPN tunnel between the VPN gateway and a remote VPN tunnel terminal point through the captive network over the Internet, wherein every device behind the VPN tunnel terminal point routes its traffic over the VPN tunnel;
• remove the firewall rules previously added so that all network traffic from the devices in the protected network is routed thereafter over the VPN tunnel once the VPN tunnel is established.