Book Image

Mastering Palo Alto Networks - Second Edition

By : Tom Piens aka Piens aka 'reaper'
Book Image

Mastering Palo Alto Networks - Second Edition

By: Tom Piens aka Piens aka 'reaper'

Overview of this book

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. This book is an end-to-end guide to configure firewalls and deploy them in your network infrastructure. You will see how to quickly set up, configure and understand the technology, and troubleshoot any issues that may occur. This book will serve as your go-to reference for everything from setting up to troubleshooting complex issues. You will learn your way around the web interface and command-line structure, understand how the technology works so you can confidently predict the expected behavior, and successfully troubleshoot any anomalies you may encounter. Finally, you will see how to deploy firewalls in a cloud environment, and special or unique considerations when setting them to protect resources. By the end of this book, for your configuration setup you will instinctively know how to approach challenges, find the resources you need, and solve most issues efficiently.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
16
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17
Index

Understanding and building security rules

We now need to build some security rules to allow or deny traffic in and out of the network. The default rules will only allow intrazone traffic and will block everything else, as you can see here:

Figure 3.23 – Default security rules

Figure 3.24: Default security rules

In the next sections, we will start to build a rule base, making sure we first introduce some rules to drop undesirable sources and destinations, followed by adding permissive policies focused on allowing applications required by the users in a secure way, leveraging App-ID to ensure only the intended applications are let through. Finally, we’ll look in more detail at which objects make up rule bases and how the rules can be kept tidy after having been in use for a while.

We will first make sure “bad” traffic is dropped by creating two new rules—one for inbound and one for outbound traffic.

Dropping “bad” traffic

The inbound rule will have the...