Book Image

Mastering Palo Alto Networks

By : Tom Piens aka Piens aka 'reaper'
Book Image

Mastering Palo Alto Networks

By: Tom Piens aka Piens aka 'reaper'

Overview of this book

To safeguard against security threats, it is crucial to ensure that your organization is effectively secured across networks, mobile devices, and the cloud. Palo Alto Networks’ integrated platform makes it easy to manage network and cloud security along with endpoint protection and a wide range of security services. With this book, you'll understand Palo Alto Networks and learn how to implement essential techniques, right from deploying firewalls through to advanced troubleshooting. The book starts by showing you how to set up and configure the Palo Alto Networks firewall, helping you to understand the technology and appreciate the simple, yet powerful, PAN-OS platform. Once you've explored the web interface and command-line structure, you'll be able to predict expected behavior and troubleshoot anomalies with confidence. You'll learn why and how to create strong security policies and discover how the firewall protects against encrypted threats. In addition to this, you'll get to grips with identifying users and controlling access to your network with user IDs and even prioritize traffic using quality of service (QoS). The book will show you how to enable special modes on the firewall for shared environments and extend security capabilities to smaller locations. By the end of this network security book, you'll be well-versed with advanced troubleshooting techniques and best practices recommended by an experienced security engineer and Palo Alto Networks expert.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: First Steps and Basic Configuration
4
Section 2: Advanced Configuration and Putting the Features to Work
10
Section 3: Maintenance and Troubleshooting

Interpreting session details

The log details tell you a lot about a session, but not everything. Sessions, while being processed, have several different parameters that only translate to how they are being processed at a particular moment in time.

The session table is made up of a finite number of session IDs, so session IDs end up getting reused after the available IDs have been cycled through. There are seven different states that a session can be in:

  • Initial or INIT: A session that is ready and waiting to be used by a new flow is in the INIT state.
  • Opening: This is a transient state in which a session ID is assigned to a flow while it is being evaluated to become a full session. This stage accounts for half-open TCP connections, so it has more aggressive timers that close the session if the handshake is not completed within due time.
  • Active: This is the state in which everything happens – the flow is up and packets are being passed back and forth.
  • Closing...