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

Exploring the API

The API is a universally compatible way of accessing the firewall and executing all sorts of commands, from extracting information to adding and updating runtime information or configuration. If you have external monitoring, you could automate adding blacklisted IPs on the firewall when a security event is triggered, or if an access point supports sending out API commands, it could update user-to-IP mapping on the firewall when a user logs on or off.

To be able to use the API, however, you will always need an API key to authenticate any remote sources making a connection to the firewall. You can generate a key using the following command from the terminal or command line:

curl -k -X GET 'https://<firewall>/api/?type=keygen&user=<username>&password=<password>'

Alternatively, you can search the following URL in a browser:

https://<firewall>/api/?type=keygen&user=<username>&password=<password&gt...