Security Profiles
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- Cloud Management of NGFWs
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- PAN-OS 11.0
- PAN-OS 11.1 & Later
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- PAN-OS 10.1
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- PAN-OS 11.1 & Later
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- Cloud Management and AIOps for NGFW
- PAN-OS 10.0 (EoL)
- PAN-OS 10.1
- PAN-OS 10.2
- PAN-OS 11.0
- PAN-OS 11.1
- PAN-OS 11.2
- PAN-OS 8.1 (EoL)
- PAN-OS 9.0 (EoL)
- PAN-OS 9.1 (EoL)
End-of-Life (EoL)
Security Profiles
While security policy rules enable you to allow or block
traffic on your network, security profiles help you define an allow
but scan rule, which scans allowed applications for threats,
such as viruses, malware, spyware, and DDOS attacks. When traffic
matches the allow rule defined in the security policy, the security
profile(s) that are attached to the rule are applied for further
content inspection rules such as antivirus checks and data filtering.
Security profiles are not used in the match criteria of
a traffic flow. The security profile is applied to scan traffic
after the application or category is allowed by the security policy.
The firewall provides default security profiles that you can
use out of the box to begin protecting your network from threats.
See Set
Up a Basic Security Policy for information on using the default
profiles in your security policy. As you get a better understanding
about the security needs on your network, see Create Best Practice Security Profiles for the
Internet Gateway to learn how you can create custom profiles.
For recommendations on the best-practice
settings for security profiles, see Create Best Practice Security Profiles for the
Internet Gateway.
You can add security profiles that are commonly applied together
to Create
a Security Profile Group; this set of profiles can be treated
as a unit and added to security policies in one step (or included
in security policies by default, if you choose to set up a default
security profile group).
Profile Type | Description |
---|---|
Antivirus Profiles | Antivirus profiles protect against viruses,
worms, and trojans as well as spyware downloads. Using a stream-based
malware prevention engine, which inspects traffic the moment the
first packet is received, the Palo Alto Networks antivirus solution
can provide protection for clients without significantly impacting
the performance of the firewall. This profile scans for a wide variety
of malware in executables, PDF files, HTML and JavaScript viruses,
including support for scanning inside compressed files and data
encoding schemes. If you have enabled Decryption on
the firewall, the profile also enables scanning of decrypted content. The
default profile inspects all of the listed protocol decoders for viruses,
and generates alerts for SMTP, IMAP, and POP3 protocols while blocking
for FTP, HTTP, and SMB protocols. You can configure the action for
a decoder or Antivirus signature and specify how the firewall responds
to a threat event:
Customized
profiles can be used to minimize antivirus inspection for traffic
between trusted security zones, and to maximize the inspection of
traffic received from untrusted zones, such as the internet, as
well as the traffic sent to highly sensitive destinations, such
as server farms. The Palo Alto Networks WildFire system also
provides signatures for persistent threats that are more evasive
and have not yet been discovered by other antivirus solutions. As
threats are discovered by WildFire, signatures are quickly created
and then integrated into the standard Antivirus signatures that
can be downloaded by Threat Prevention subscribers on a daily basis
(sub-hourly for WildFire subscribers). |
Anti-Spyware Profiles | Anti-Spyware profiles blocks spyware on
compromised hosts from trying to phone-home or beacon out to external
command-and-control (C2) servers, allowing you to detect malicious
traffic leaving the network from infected clients. You can apply
various levels of protection between zones. For example, you may
want to have custom Anti-Spyware profiles that minimize inspection
between trusted zones, while maximizing inspection on traffic received
from an untrusted zone, such as internet-facing zones. When the
firewall is managed by a Panorama management server, the ThreatID
is mapped to the corresponding custom threat on the firewall to
enable the firewall to generate a threat log populated with the
configured custom ThreatID. You can define your own custom
Anti-Spyware profiles, or choose one of the following predefined
profiles when applying Anti-Spyware to a Security policy rule:
When
the firewall detects a threat event, you can configure the following
actions in an Anti-Spyware profile:
In addition, you
can enable the DNS
Sinkholing action in Anti-Spyware profiles to enable the
firewall to forge a response to a DNS query for a known malicious
domain, causing the malicious domain name to resolve to an IP address
that you define. This feature helps to identify infected hosts on
the protected network using DNS traffic. Infected hosts can then
be easily identified in the traffic and threat logs because any
host that attempts to connect to the sinkhole IP address are most
likely infected with malware. Anti-Spyware and Vulnerability
Protection profiles are configured similarly. |
Vulnerability Protection Profiles | Vulnerability Protection profiles stop attempts
to exploit system flaws or gain unauthorized access to systems.
While Anti-Spyware profiles help identify infected hosts as traffic
leaves the network, Vulnerability Protection profiles protect against
threats entering the network. For example, Vulnerability Protection
profiles help protect against buffer overflows, illegal code execution,
and other attempts to exploit system vulnerabilities. The default
Vulnerability Protection profile protects clients and servers from
all known critical, high, and medium-severity threats. You can also
create exceptions, which allow you to change the response to a specific
signature. When the firewall is managed by a Panorama management
server, the ThreatID is mapped to the corresponding custom threat
on the firewall to enable the firewall to generate a threat log
populated with the configured custom ThreatID. When the firewall
detects a threat event, you can configure the following actions
in an Anti-Spyware profile:
|
URL Filtering Profiles | URL
Filtering profiles enable you to monitor and control how
users access the web over HTTP and HTTPS. The firewall comes with
a default profile that is configured to block websites such as known
malware sites, phishing sites, and adult content sites. You can use
the default profile in a security policy, clone it to be used as
a starting point for new URL filtering profiles, or add a new URL
profile that will have all categories set to allow for visibility
into the traffic on your network. You can then customize the newly
added URL profiles and add lists of specific websites that should
always be blocked or allowed, which provides more granular control
over URL categories. |
Data
Filtering Profiles | Data filtering profiles prevent sensitive
information such as credit card or social security numbers from
leaving a protected network. The data filtering profile also allows
you to filter on key words, such as a sensitive project name or
the word confidential. It is important to focus your profile on
the desired file types to reduce false positives. For example, you
may only want to search Word documents or Excel spreadsheets. You
may also only want to scan web-browsing traffic, or FTP. You
can create custom data pattern objects and attach them to a Data
Filtering profile to define the type of information on which you
want to filter. Create data pattern objects based on:
If
you’re using a third-party, endpoint data loss prevention (DLP)
solutions to populate file properties to indicate sensitive content,
this option enables the firewall to enforce your DLP policy. To
get started, Set
Up Data Filtering. |
File
Blocking Profiles | The firewall uses file blocking profiles
to block specified file types over specified applications and in
the specified session flow direction (inbound/outbound/both). You
can set the profile to alert or block on upload and/or download
and you can specify which applications will be subject to the file
blocking profile. You can also configure custom block pages that
will appear when a user attempts to download the specified file
type. This allows the user to take a moment to consider whether
or not they want to download a file. You can define your own
custom File Blocking profiles, or choose one of the following predefined
profiles when applying file blocking to a Security policy rule.
The predefined profiles, which are available with content release
version 653 and later, allow you to quickly enable best practice file blocking settings:
Configure
a file blocking profile with the following actions:
To get started, Set
Up File Blocking. |
WildFire Analysis Profiles | Use a WildFire analysis profile to enable
the firewall to forward unknown files or email links for WildFire analysis.
Specify files to be forwarded for analysis based on application, file
type, and transmission direction (upload or download). Files or
email links matched to the profile rule are forwarded either the
WildFire public cloud or the WildFire private cloud (hosted with
a WF-500 appliance), depending on the analysis location defined
for the rule. If a profile rule is set to forward files to the WildFire
public cloud, the firewall also forwards files that match existing
antivirus signatures, in addition to unknown files. You can
also use the WildFire analysis profiles to set up a WildFire hybrid cloud deployment.
If you are using a WildFire appliance to analyze sensitive files
locally (such as PDFs), you can specify for less sensitive files
types (such as PE files) or file types that are not supported for
WildFire appliance analysis (such as APKs) to be analyzed by the
WildFire public cloud. Using both the WildFire appliance and the
WildFire cloud for analysis allows you to benefit from a prompt
verdict for files that have already been processed by the cloud, and
for files that are not supported for appliance analysis, and frees
up the appliance capacity to process sensitive content. |
DoS Protection Profiles | DoS protection profiles provide detailed
control for Denial of Service (DoS) protection policies. DoS policies
allow you to control the number of sessions between interfaces,
zones, addresses, and countries based on aggregate sessions or source
and/or destination IP addresses. There are two DoS protection mechanisms
that the Palo Alto Networks firewalls support.
You
can enable both types of protection mechanisms in a single DoS protection
profile. The DoS profile is used to specify the type of action
to take and details on matching criteria for the DoS policy. The
DoS profile defines settings for SYN, UDP, and ICMP floods, can
enable resource protect and defines the maximum number of concurrent
connections. After you configure the DoS protection profile, you
then attach it to a DoS policy. When configuring DoS protection,
it is important to analyze your environment in order to set the
correct thresholds and due to some of the complexities of defining
DoS protection policies, this guide will not go into detailed examples. |
Zone Protection Profiles | Zone
Protection Profiles provide additional protection between
specific network zones in order to protect the zones against attack.
The profile must be applied to the entire zone, so it is important
to carefully test the profiles in order to prevent issues that may
arise with the normal traffic traversing the zones. When defining connections
per second (cps) thresholds limits for zone protection profiles,
the threshold is based on the packets per second that do not match
a previously established session. |
Security Profile Group | A security profile group is a set of security
profiles that can be treated as a unit and then easily added to
security policies. Profiles that are often assigned together can
be added to profile groups to simplify the creation of security
policies. You can also setup a default security profile group—new
security policies will use the settings defined in the default profile
group to check and control traffic that matches the security policy.
Name a security profile group default to allow the profiles in that
group to be added to new security policies by default. This allows you
to consistently include your organization’s preferred profile settings in
new policies automatically, without having to manually add security profiles
each time you create new rules. For recommendations on the best-practice
settings for security profiles, see Create Best Practice Security Profiles for the
Internet Gateway. |