NGFW-Engineer Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewall Engineer Questions and Answers

To meet the company's requirements - minimizing changes to the cloud environments, optimizing compute resources, and unifying security policies - the best approach is to deploy Cloud NGFW solutions natively for AWS and Azure while managing policies centrally with Panorama.

In Azure, using Cloud NGFW for Azure deployed within vNETs allows traffic to be routed through security appliances efficiently without requiring a complete re-architecture. This approach aligns with Azure's existing routing mechanism while maintaining security.

In AWS, deploying Cloud NGFW for AWS in a centralized Security VPC and integrating it with AWS Transit Gateway enables traffic inspection for all connected VPCs without modifying individual workloads. This method ensures efficient scaling and minimal infrastructure changes while maintaining security consistency.

To implement post-quantum cryptography (PQC) in VPNs between Palo Alto Networks NGFWs, you would enable the PQ KEM (Post-Quantum Key Encapsulation Mechanism) in the IKE gateway configuration. This enables the firewall to use quantum-resistant encryption for key exchange, which is an essential part of securing communications against the potential future threats posed by quantum computing.

By selecting IKE v2 Preferred and enabling the PQ KEM option under Advanced Options, you can add specific Rounds for the post-quantum cryptography process, which will help in implementing quantum-resistant key exchange methods.

This option similarly selects IKE v2 and enables PQ KEM while also creating a dedicated IKE Crypto Profile with the necessary Rounds configured for post-quantum cryptography.

In a High Availability (HA) active/passive pair configuration, when setting up an Aggregate Ethernet (AE) interface, enabling the "Enable in HA Passive State" option allows the interface to participate in LACP (Link Aggregation Control Protocol) even when the system is in the passive state. This ensures that the pre-negotiation of the LACP link occurs, allowing the link aggregation to be ready as soon as the firewall becomes active.

In the context of GlobalProtect with certificate-based authentication, certificate profiles are used to ensure proper validation of the certificates. They perform the following functions:

Define trust anchors, which are the root and intermediate Certificate Authorities (CAs) that the firewall trusts to authenticate certificates.

Specify revocation checks, such as CRL (Certificate Revocation List) and OCSP (Online Certificate Status Protocol), to ensure that the certificates being used have not been revoked.

Map certificate attributes, such as the Common Name (CN), which helps in authenticating users and devices based on their certificates.

The Transient zone type is used to allow traffic between zones in different virtual systems (VSYS) on a Palo Alto Networks firewall without the traffic leaving the firewall. It provides a way for virtual systems to communicate with each other by acting as a temporary or intermediary zone. Traffic can pass through the firewall between the virtual systems without requiring physical interfaces or leaving the device.

In an active/passive HA setup, the recommended process for upgrading involves minimizing downtime and ensuring traffic continuity by using the failover process:

Suspend the active firewall: This triggers a failover to the passive unit, making it the active unit.

Upgrade the former passive (now active) unit: With traffic now running on the previously passive unit, upgrade the suspended unit while the active unit continues handling traffic.

Confirm proper operation: Once the upgrade is complete, verify that the upgraded unit is functioning properly.

Fail traffic back: Once the upgraded firewall is confirmed to be working, fail the traffic back to the original active unit and upgrade the remaining firewall.

In Panorama, without performing a context switch, the administrator can perform local configuration tasks directly on the connected firewall. The following operations can be done:

Modification of local security rules: Security rules can be modified directly on the connected firewall from the Panorama GUI.

Modification of a Layer 3 interface: Changes to the Layer 3 interfaces on the connected firewall can be done from Panorama, without needing to switch to the firewall's local interface.

Modification of the firewall device hostname: The firewall's hostname can be changed via Panorama.

By default, the Autonomous Digital Experience Manager (ADEM) traffic is configured to use the management interface in a Palo Alto Networks firewall. The management interface is typically used for management-related traffic, such as monitoring and logging, and it is configured to handle ADEM-related traffic for the optimal performance of digital experience monitoring features.

This default configuration helps ensure that ADEM traffic does not interfere with regular traffic that may traverse other interfaces, such as traffic from security zones or IPSec tunnels.

In a hybrid authentication model with both certificate-based authentication for pre-logon and SAML-based multi-factor authentication (MFA) for user logon, the GlobalProtect agent processes the flow as follows:

During the pre-logon stage, the agent uses the machine certificate to authenticate and establish the initial VPN tunnel.

Once the user logs in (after the machine is connected), the agent then triggers SAML-based MFA to ensure the user is authenticated with multi-factor authentication, validating both the device and the user identity before granting full access.

This method ensures that both the device and user are properly authenticated and validated in the hybrid authentication model.

The phases of the Palo Alto Networks AI Runtime Security: Network Intercept solution are designed to help identify and protect against potential threats in real time by using AI to detect and prevent malicious activities within the network.

Discovery: Identifying applications, services, and behaviors within the network to understand baseline activity.

Deployment: Implementing the solution into the network and integrating with existing security measures.

Detection: Monitoring traffic and activities to identify abnormal or malicious behavior.

Prevention: Taking action to stop threats once detected, such as blocking malicious traffic or stopping exploit attempts.

In this scenario, the customer requires that users do not directly access websites and that a security device (the firewall) manages the connection, while also ensuring that there is authentication back to the Active Directory (AD) servers for all sessions. The explicit proxy with Kerberos authentication is the best solution because:

The explicit proxy allows the firewall to intercept user web traffic and manage the connections on behalf of users.

Kerberos authentication ensures that the user’s identity is validated against the Active Directory servers before the session is allowed, fulfilling the authentication requirement.

When the preemptive hold time is set to 0 minutes in route monitoring, the firewall is configured to immediately reinstall the route into the Routing Information Base (RIB) as soon as the monitored path comes up. This essentially means that the firewall will not wait for any predefined hold time before reestablishing the route once the monitoring condition is met, ensuring a faster recovery of the route.