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

Setting up the VPN

There are several ways of connecting devices in a secure way. Palo Alto Networks firewalls currently support the following protocols:

  • Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) is a fairly old protocol that is not very secure but can be useful if legacy devices need to be connected to the firewall to provide rudimentary security to the encapsulated packets.
  • Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) is the de facto tunneling protocol between remote sites and can be used for very strong encryption.
  • Secure Socket Layer (SSL), which is really Transport Layer Security (TLS), is used to connect endpoints over a network-friendly protocol.

To set up GRE tunnels, you can set up a connection in Networks | GRE Tunnels. All you need to configure is the following:

  • Name
  • Source interface
  • Source IP
  • Destination IP
  • Tunnel interface
  • TTL (default 64)
  • Keepalive

Set up the same configurations on the remote end to get it going. Routing and...