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

Understanding the interface types

When you open the Network | Interfaces menu, you will see an assortment of physical interfaces.

There are four basic interface types that determine how an interface will behave, which we will discuss in this section:

  • Virtual Wire (VWire)
  • Layer 3
  • Layer 2
  • Tap

Let's discuss them in more detail.

VWire

Just as the name suggests, VWire is intended to be a "bump in the wire." VWire always consists of two physical interfaces—no more and no less. There is no low-level interference with VLAN tags and there are no routing options; packets are inspected in flow.

Using a VWire interface can be an easy way to "drop in a firewall" without needing to interfere with an existing routing or switching environment. It easily plugs in in front of an ISP router or can be placed in between a Honeypot and the network to add a layer of detection.

Before you can create a VWire interface, you first need...