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

Leveraging SSL decryption to break open encrypted sessions

SSL/TLS and SSH decryption perform a man-in-the-middle attack but for good instead of evil—an encrypted session is intercepted, then through the use of trusted certificates, the session is deciphered and the payload is made visible for content inspection and App-ID to take a look at. There are three modes of SSL decryption currently available:

  • SSH proxy
  • SSL forward proxy
  • SSL inbound inspection

Let's look at each of them in detail.

SSH proxy

SSH proxy allows the interception of SSH sessions. It requires a decryption profile that contains a trusted root signing certificate, a Certificate Authority (CA), and allows you to control tunneling over an SSH session by setting a security policy for ssh-tunnel.

SSL forward proxy

SSL forward proxy is used for all outbound sessions. There are two distinct directions, and the outbound option is proxied because of how certificates are used to...