Security Profiles
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- Cloud Management of NGFWs
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- PAN-OS 11.0
- PAN-OS 11.1 & Later
- PAN-OS 9.1 (EoL)
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- PAN-OS 10.1
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- PAN-OS 11.0
- 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 virus, malware, spyware, and DDoS
attacks. When traffic matches the allow rule defined in the
Security policy rule, the Security Profile(s) 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 rule.
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. 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 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
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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 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 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).
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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. 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 detects a threat event, you can configure the following actions in a
Vulnerability Protection profile:
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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 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, 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 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
files 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 WF-500 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.
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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 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 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.
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