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

Hardening the management interface

It is paramount that the management interface is kept secure and access is limited to only those administrators that need access. It is recommended to place the physical management interface in an Out-of-Band (oob) network, which limits exposure to the broader network. If access is needed to the management server from a different network, it is best to set up a dual-homes bastion host that mediates the connection, either through only allowing admins to log into it and use services from there, or having it set as a (transparent) proxy with a log of all sessions and limiting the source users and IP subnets as much as possible.

Limiting access via an access List

The management interface local access list can be edited by navigating to Device | Setup | Interfaces and clicking on the Management Interface:

Figure 2.25 – Management interface access list

The associated CLI configure mode command is as follows:

admin...