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 a captive portal

A captive portal is a service that runs on the firewall and intercepts web sessions to have a user identify themselves. This can be a good addition to your user identification capabilities for unsupported operating systems that do not log on to the network, or guests that come into your network that you want to be able to identify.

It can also help pick up "strays"; for instance, a laptop may be used to roam a campus and hop SSIDs and Access Points, and it may be assigned a new IP address without generating a new logon event on Active Directory. At this moment, the user becomes unknown and a captive portal can be triggered to have the user log in manually.

To set up a captive portal, we will first need to be able to authenticate users, which we will cover in the next section.

Authenticating users

To be able to authenticate users, we need to create an authentication profile that manages which protocol and server will be used. Create...