Comprehensive and Detailed 150 to 200 words of Explanation From Exact Extract of Enterprise Firewall 7.6 Administrator documents:

Based on the FortiOS 7.6 Administration Guide and the Life of a Packet documentation (Parallel Path Processing), the FortiGate follows a specific, hardcoded sequence when processing the first packet of a new session. This process is divided into several stages: Ingress, Kernel, and Egress.

The very first stage is Ingress, where all packets accepted by a network interface are processed by the TCP/IP stack. Immediately following this, the packet must pass through IP integrity header checking. This step involves reading the packet headers to verify that the packet is a valid protocol (TCP, UDP, ICMP, etc.) and that the header length is correct. This sanity check is performed before any other security functions, such as decryption (which occurs later in the Ingress stage) or the Reverse Path Forwarding (RPF) check (which occurs even later during the Routing step in the Kernel stage).

Installation of the session key (Option A) only occurs after the packet has matched a firewall policy and the session has been fully established and offloaded to the NPU. Therefore, IP integrity header checking is the absolute first security-related validation performed on an incoming packet.