Security Profiles
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- Cloud Management of NGFWs
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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)
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 virus, malware, spyware, and DDoS
attacks. When traffic matches the allow rule defined in the
Security policy rule, the Security Profiles 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 Security policy rule allows the application or
category.
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
rule.
For recommendations on the best practice settings for Security Profiles, review the best practices for creating security
profiles.
You can add Security Profiles that are commonly applied together to Create a Security Profile
Group; this set of profiles are treated as a unit and added to Security
policy rules in one step (or included in Security policy rules 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 the listed protocol decoders for viruses, and generates alerts
for SMTP, IMAP, and POP3 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 help 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 WildFire discovers threats, signatures are quickly
created and then integrated into the standard antivirus signatures
that can be downloaded by Threat Prevention subscribers daily
(subhourly 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
might 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 is 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 a
Vulnerability Protection 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 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 rule, 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 might only want to search Word
documents or Excel spreadsheets. You might 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, see 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 or download and you can specify which applications are
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 to 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 WF-500 appliance to analyze sensitive
files locally (such as PDFs), you can specify for less sensitive
file types (such as PE files) or file types that are not supported
for WF-500 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 policy
rules. DoS policy rules 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 Protection profile is used to specify the type of action to take and details on matching
criteria for the DoS policy rule. The DoS Protection profile defines
settings for SYN, UDP, and ICMP floods, can enable resource
protection and defines the maximum number of concurrent connections.
After you configure the DoS Protection profile, you then attach it
to a DoS policy rule. When configuring DoS protection, it is important to analyze your environment to set the correct
thresholds and due to some of the complexities of defining DoS
Protection policy rules, this guide will not go into detailed
examples. |
Zone Protection Profiles | Zone Protection
Profiles provide additional protection between specific
network zones to protect the zones against attack. The profile must
be applied to the entire zone, so it is important to carefully test
the profiles to prevent issues that might arise with the normal
traffic traversing the zones. When defining packets per second (pps)
threshold 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 treated as a unit and then easily added to
Security policy rules. Profiles often assigned together can be added
to profile groups to simplify the creation of Security policy rules.
You can also set up a default Security Profile Group—new Security
policy rules will use the settings defined in the default profile
group to check and control traffic that matches the Security policy
rule. Name a Security Profile Group default
to allow the profiles in that group to be added to new Security
policy rules by default. This allows you to consistently include
your organization’s preferred profile settings in new policy rules
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. |