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    Advanced Threat Prevention Powered by Precision AI®

    Frontier Virtual Patching

    Table of Contents

    Frontier Virtual Patching

    Learn how Frontier Virtual Patching provides vaulted, cloud-based protections against zero-day exploits and pre-disclosure vulnerabilities.
    Where Can I Use This?What Do I Need?
    • NGFW (Managed by Strata Cloud Manager)
    • NGFW (Managed by PAN-OS or Panorama)
    • Advanced Threat Prevention Plus license
    Frontier Virtual Patching is a cloud-based detection module included with the Advanced Threat Prevention Plus (ATP+) subscription. It extends Advanced Threat Prevention with preemptive network protections for vulnerabilities that have not been publicly disclosed or patched by software vendors — delivering streaming protection updates within hours of vulnerability discovery. This closes the critical exposure window between when a vulnerability is discovered and when a patch becomes available.
    Frontier Virtual Patching introduces three capabilities that move beyond the reactive signature model of content-based IPS:
    • Proactive vulnerability discovery—Uses multimodel frontier AI to uncover previously unknown and unpatched vulnerabilities across critical open-source software repositories and private predisclosure feeds from industry partners.
    • Preemptive protection—Reduces the window of exposure to unpatched or unpatchable vulnerabilities by rapidly delivering protections before public vulnerability disclosure or vendor patch availability.
    • Vaulted protection—Delivers proactive defense without disclosing sensitive vulnerability details. Signature details and traffic inspection logic are held in the cloud, preventing adversaries from reverse-engineering the underlying vulnerability.

    Vulnerability Sources

    Frontier Virtual Patching proactively discovers and ingests vulnerabilities from multiple sources:
    • Open-source discovery (NOVA)—The Network and Open-Source Vulnerability Analyzer (NOVA) is a Palo Alto Networks agentic research system that uses proprietary harnesses powered by multiple leading frontier AI models to scan thousands of critical open-source software repositories, identifying hidden flaws before they can be weaponized.
    • Critical Defense Program (CDP)—A private consortium that provides exclusive, predisclosure threat feeds from enterprise software vendors and operational technology (OT), IoT, medical, and industrial device manufacturers, including partners such as IBM Lightwell and Chainguard.
    • Vulnerability clearinghouses—Partnerships with industry vulnerability clearinghouses provide additional predisclosure intelligence beyond what NOVA and the CDP produce directly.

    How Frontier Virtual Patching Works

    Frontier Virtual Patching operates as a cloud inspection service that works alongside your existing Advanced Threat Prevention deployment:
    1. Pre-filter deployment—When you activate an ATP+ license and enable Frontier Virtual Patching in a Vulnerability Protection profile, the firewall downloads a pre-filter from the Frontier Virtual Patching cloud. The pre-filter allows the firewall to efficiently identify sessions that may match a pre-disclosure signature without exposing the signatures themselves.
    2. Traffic pre-filtering—As traffic passes through the firewall, the data plane checks sessions against the pre-filter. Sessions that do not match are processed normally with no additional overhead. Sessions that match are forwarded to the Frontier Virtual Patching cloud for deeper inspection.
    3. Cloud-based inspection—The cloud evaluates forwarded sessions against the full set of vaulted signatures. For each session, the cloud returns a per-signature verdict: malicious (a predisclosure signature matched) or benign (no signature matched).
    4. Action enforcement—The firewall enforces the action you configured for the matching severity level (Critical, High, or Medium). Malicious verdicts generate a threat log entry with a unique Threat ID and a Cloud Report ID for retrieving the full analysis report. Benign verdicts are not logged.
    The firewall must have outbound HTTPS access (TCP 443) to the Frontier Virtual Patching cloud detection service (cds.fvp.tpcloud.paloaltonetworks.com) and the signature delivery endpoint (storage.googleapis.com). If your environment restricts outbound traffic, add these domains to your network allow list.

    Frontier Virtual Patching and Advanced Threat Prevention

    Frontier Virtual Patching complements — but does not replace — existing Advanced Threat Prevention capabilities. Advanced Threat Prevention Plus is a superset: it includes everything in Advanced Threat Prevention (standard vulnerability protection content, C2 protection content, Precision AI inline protection from unknown C2 and never-before-seen exploits, and custom signature compatibility) plus the preemptive protections provided by Frontier Virtual Patching.
    Standard Advanced Threat Prevention signatures are delivered through content updates, cover publicly known vulnerabilities (CVEs), and include detailed metadata such as CVE numbers, vendor IDs, and reference links. Frontier Virtual Patching signatures use vaulted protection in the cloud, cover vulnerabilities that have not yet been publicly disclosed, and use intentionally limited metadata to prevent exposing sensitive vulnerability details.
    The two services are independent: enabling or disabling Frontier Virtual Patching has no effect on your Inline Cloud Analysis (ICA) configuration or standard content-based signature detections.

    Predisclosure Signature Metadata

    Vaulted protection means that while a vulnerability remains under embargo, the associated Frontier Virtual Patching signature details and inspection logic are held in the cloud, and the signature uses intentionally limited metadata to prevent exposing information about the vulnerability before the affected vendor has released a patch. This restriction applies regardless of nondisclosure agreements or other contractual arrangements:
    • Name—"Pre-Disclosure Vulnerability Exploit" for all predisclosure signatures.
    • Status—"Pre-Disclosure."
    • Unique Threat ID—The permanent identifier for the signature.
    • Description—"Under embargo — details withheld until coordinated disclosure."
    • Category—Code-Execution for all predisclosure signatures.
    • PAN-OS Minimum Version—The earliest PAN-OS version that supports this signature.
    • Severity—Critical, High, or Medium.
    • Action—The Palo Alto Networks recommended default action (for example, "Reset-server"). These default actions are set by Palo Alto Networks to ensure optimal security vs availability given the detection nature.
    • Vendor ID—Blank while the signature is in predisclosure.
    • Vulnerability Discovery Source—The entity that discovered the vulnerability (for example, "Palo Alto Networks Research").
    • CVE—"Unassigned" until the vulnerability is publicly disclosed and a CVE is assigned.
    • Vulnerability Disclosure—Blank while the signature is in predisclosure.
    • Pre-Disclosure Release—The date the signature was added to the Frontier Virtual Patching cloud.
    • First Release Date—Blank while the signature is in predisclosure; set when the disclosed signature is first published in a content update.
    • Latest Update Date—Blank while the signature is in predisclosure; set when the disclosed signature is updated in a content release.
    • Reference—Blank while the signature is in predisclosure; a link to an informational page about the exploit category.
    You can view this metadata in ThreatVault and in your threat logs. ThreatVault also displays a Protection Status indicator that shows how long the predisclosure protection was active before the first attack was seen in your network (for example, "30 Days Protected Before First Attack"), along with an Evidence in Your Network panel that shows first-seen and last-seen dates with a timeline of blocked and alerted detections.

    Licensing

    Frontier Virtual Patching requires an Advanced Threat Prevention Plus (ATP+) license. For license acquisition paths and activation steps, see Advanced Threat Prevention License Options.
    Firewalls with a standard Threat Prevention or Advanced Threat Prevention license (without ATP+) do not see the Frontier Virtual Patching tab in the Vulnerability Protection profile.

    Platform Support

    Frontier Virtual Patching is supported on PA-Series hardware firewalls. The feature requires PAN-OS 12.2.4 or later.
    After you upgrade Panorama to PAN-OS 12.2.4 or later, Panorama automatically triggers Frontier Virtual Patching download jobs every 5 minutes. These jobs appear in the job queue (show jobs processed) as FVP Download entries regardless of whether you have an Advanced Threat Prevention Plus license. If you do not use Frontier Virtual Patching, you can change the download interval or disable the downloads through the Panorama CLI (there is no web interface for these settings):
    admin@Panorama# set deviceconfig setting fvp update-interval 60
    admin@Panorama# set deviceconfig setting fvp disable yes

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