Supported Security Policy Management Features
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Cloud NGFW for Azure

Supported Security Policy Management Features

Table of Contents

Supported Security Policy Management Features

The Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW for AWS supports the following security features.
Where Can I Use This?What Do I Need?
  • Cloud NGFW for Azure
  • Cloud NGFW subscription
  • Palo Alto Networks Customer Support Portal (CSP) account
  • Azure Marketplace subscription
The Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW for Azure supports the following security features.
Security Posture, Health Posture, and Operations
Description
Native Policy Management (Rulestacks)
Panorama Policy Management (Cloud Device Groups)
Strata Cloud Manager (SCM) Policy Management
Log Visualization & Analytics
Cloud NGFW can deliver the generated logs to Azure destinations, Palo Alto Networks Log Collector and Strata Logging Service. Review Cloud NGFW logs to verify a wealth of information of your VNet and vWAN traffic. Allows you to monitor the traffic by applications, users, and content activity—URL categories, threats, security policies that effectively block data or files.
Azure Log Analytics Workspace
Strata Logging Service
Panorama Log Collector
Policy Analysis & Optimization
Rule usage monitoring helps you evaluate whether your policy implementation continues to match your enforcement needs.
Policy Analyzer analyzes your Cloud NGFW rules and recommends possible consolidation or removal of specific rules to meet your intended Security posture. it also checks for aN/Amalies, such as shadows, redundancies, generalizations, correlations, and consolidations in your rulebase.
Policy Optimizer identifies port-based rules so you can convert them to application-based allow rules or add applications from a port-based rule to an existing application-based rule without compromising application availability.
Operational Metrics
You can specify Palo Alto Networks firewalls to publish custom metrics to monitoring systems in Palo Alto Networks (AIOPs), Panorama or Azure AppInsights . These metrics allow you to assess firewall performance and usage patterns.
Azure AppInsights
Palo Alto Networks AIOPs
Packet Capture
You can specify Palo Alto Networks firewall to perform a custom packet capture or a threat packet capture.
Threat Packet Captures
Traffic Packet Captures
Policy Objects
Description
Native Policy Management (Rulestacks)
Panorama Policy Management (Cloud Device Groups)
Strata Cloud Manager (SCM) Policy Management
Address
You can specify an address object to include either IPv4 or IPv6 addresses (a single IP address, a range of addresses, or a subnet), an FQDN, or a wildcard address (IPv4 address followed by a slash and wildcard mask).
Address Groups
You can group specific source or destination addresses that require the same policy enforcement.
Regions
You can allow or block traffic from (or to) an IP addresses based on their geographic location such as a county. The region is available as an option when specifying the source and destination for your policy rules. You can choose from a standard list of countries or specify a custom region or geolocation along with its associated IP addresses
Service (Port & Protocol)
You can granularly control VPC traffic session usage to specific ports on your network (in other words, you can define the default port for the application). Cloud NGFW includes two predefined services—service-http and service-https— that use TCP ports 80 and 8080 for HTTP, and TCP port 443 for HTTPS. You can however create any custom service on any TCP/UDP port of your choice.
Service Groups
You can combine services that have the same security settings into Service Groups to reduce the number of rules in Security policy.
External dynamic list
You can granularly control your VPC traffic using a dynamic list of IP addresses, Domains, or URLs. Stored in a file hosted on an external web server. Palo Alto Networks also offers built-in (Bulletproof, High-Risk, Known Malicious, and Tor Exit IP address) EDLs. Additionally, Palo Alto Networks offers a free EDL hosting service that maintains the ever-dynamic list of IP addresses for Microsoft 365, Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). You can use these EDLs to control your VPC Ingress and Egress traffic.
Applications
You can granularly control your VPC traffic by using a Palo Alto Networks App-ID traffic classification system that relies on application signatures to accurately identify applications in your network.
Application group
You can group together a set of App-IDs that require the same policy enforcement.
Application filters
You can granularly control your VPC traffic by defining an application filter that groups current App-IDs and any future App-IDs that match certain attributes. For example, You can create an application filter by one or more attributes—category, subcategory, technology, risk, characteristics. From now on, whenever a new App-ID is introduced to Cloud NGFW based on a content update, all new applications matching the filter criteria are automatically added to your set.
Tags
Tags allow you to group objects using keywords or phrases. You can apply tags to address objects, address groups (static and dynamic), applications, zones, services, Service Groups, and to policy rules.
Dynamic User Group
Allow you to create a list of users from the local database, an external database, or match criteria and group them.
App-ID Cloud
Also known as the device dictionary, this page contains metadata for device objects.
Certificates and Decryption
Description
Native Policy Management (Rulestacks)
Panorama Policy Management (Cloud Device Groups)
Strata Cloud Manager (SCM) Policy Management
Certificates Management
Cloud NGFW uses certificates to access an intelligent feed and to enable inbound and outbound decryption. Each certificate contains a cryptographic key to encrypt plaintext or decrypt ciphertext. Each certificate also includes a digital signature to authenticate the identity of the issuer.
Self signed Root CA Certificates
Import a Certificate and Private Key
Cloud Certificates (Azure Secret Manager)
Decryption
Cloud NGFW can decrypt, inspect, and reencrypt your VPC Ingress and Egress traffic as a policy-based decision. You can granularly control what VPC traffic is decrypted and what traffic can’t be decrypted and the type of SSL decryption you want to perform on the indicated traffic. To enable decryption, you set up the certificates required to act as a trusted third party to a session.
SSL Forward Proxy
SSL Inbound Inspection
SSH ProxyN/A
Security Services
Description
Native Policy Management (Rulestacks)
Panorama Policy Management (Cloud Device Groups)
Strata Cloud Manager (SCM) Policy Management
Security Policy
Security policy protects your VNet traffic from threats and disruptions. Individual Security policy rules determine whether to block or allow a VNet/VNet traffic session based on traffic attributes, such as the source and destination security zone, the source and destination IP address, the application, the user, and the service.
IPS Vulnerability Protection
Vulnerability Protection protects against on inbound threats, where an attacker is attempting to exploit a system vulenrability to breach your network, The system vulnerabilies may be in the form buffer overflows, illegal code execution etc.
Default Profile
Custom Profile
Anti-spyware
Anti-Spyware detects and blocks outbound threats, especially command-and-control (C2) activity, initiated by a (cyber-attack leveraged) malware infected workloads in your Azure vNet. You can also define custom regular expression patterns to identify spyware phone home communication. Default Profile
Custom Profile
File blocking
File blocking allows you to granularly control file types in your VPC traffic in a specified direction (inbound/outbound/both). You can proactively block files known to carry threats or that have no real use case for upload and download.
Default Profile
Custom Profile
Antivirus
Antivirus detects and protects against malware concealed in compressed files, executables, PDF files, and HTML and JavaScript malware in your VPC traffic
Default Profile
Custom Profile
WildFire Analysis
Cloud NGFW detects and forwards files and executables in your VPC traffic to WildFire™ cloud service for analysis, and also performs inline ML analysis for certain files. If a threat is detected on the files, WildFire creates protections to block malware, and globally distributes protection for that threat in under five minutes.
URL Filtering
URL Filtering analyzes the VPC traffic and controls the URLs accessed by your VPC workloads (in both clear-text and encrypted traffic) by performing inline analysis and comparing against Palo Alto Networks managed URL categories or the custom categories you provide.
Default Profile
Custom Profile
DNS Security
DNS Security protects outbound DNS requests from your VPCs against threats such as DNS tunneling, Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA) detection, malware domains, etc.
Default Profile
Custom Profile
Data filtering & Enterprise DLP
Data filtering detects sensitive information in your VPC traffic—such as credit card or social security numbers or internal corporate documents—and prevent this data from leaving your AWS environment.
With Enterprise DLP, you gain the benefit of Advanced data filtering on your VPC traffic with a predefined list of data patterns with the cloud-based analytics.
Security Profile Groups
A Security Profile Group is a set of Security Profiles treated as a unit and then easily added to security policy rules.
Networking Services
Description
Native Policy Management (Rulestacks)
Panorama Policy Management (Cloud Device Groups)
Strata Cloud Manager (SCM) Policy Management
Application Override
You can configure Cloud NGFW to override the N/Armal Application Identification (App-ID) of specific traffic passing through the firewall. As soon as the Application Override policy takes effect, all further App-ID inspection of the traffic is stopped and the session is identified with the custom application signatures your provide.
NAT
Palo Alto Networks Fiirewalls can enforce Destination NAT on your Ingress vNet traffic and Source NAT your Egress vNet traffic
Ingress (destination) NAT
Egress (source) NAT
Private NAT to Azure native PaaS
Policy-based forwarding
Palo Alto Networks firewalls policy-based forwarding rules allow traffic to take an alternative path for security or performance reasons. Let's say your company has two links between the corporate office and the branch office: a cheaper internet link and a more expensive leased line. For enhanced security, you can use PBF to send applications that are not encrypted traffic, such as FTP traffic, over the private leased line and all other traffic over the internet link. Or, for performance, you can choose to route business-critical applications over the leased line while sending all other traffic, such as web browsing, over the cheaper link.
Security Zones & Protection
Description
Native Policy Management (Rulestacks)
Panorama Policy Management (Cloud Device Groups)
Strata Cloud Manager (SCM) Policy Management
Security zones
Security zones are a logical way to group interfaces on the firewall, and Cloud NGFW endpoints to control and log the VPC traffic.
Private and Public Zones
Zone Mapping
Zone protection
Zone protection defends network security zones against flood attacks, reconnaissance attempts, and packet-based attacks.
Device Settings
Description
Native Policy Management (Rulestacks)
Panorama Policy Management (Cloud Device Groups)
Strata Cloud Manager (SCM) Policy Management
XFF
Traffic to your VPC workloads might have passed more than one proxy server (such as CDN or ALB) before it reaches the Cloud NGFW. If there is an existing XFF header, these proxies append its IP address to it or adds the XFF header with its IP address. Therefore, the XFF request header might contain multiple IP addresses separated by commas. Cloud NGFW uses the X-Forwarded-For (XFF) HTTP header field that identifies the original client IP address. Cloud NGFW always uses the most recently added address in the XFF header to enforce the policy.
DNS Proxy
When you configure Cloud NGFW as a DNS proxy, it acts as an intermediary between clients and servers and as a DNS server by resolving queries from its DNS cache or forwarding queries to other DNS servers. Use this page to configure the settings that determine how the firewall serves as a DNS proxy.
Interface Management
Palo Alto Networks Firewalls allow you to configure VLANs, virtual wires Link Layer Discovery Protocol, Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) on its interfaces
QoS
Palo Alto Networks firewalls allow you to specify traffic that requires preferential treatment or bandwidth limiting. QoS rules allow you to dependably run high-priority applications and traffic under limited network capacity.
Routing Management
Palo Alto Networks Firewalls allow you to configure Static Routing and Routing Protocols (BGP, BFD, OSPF, OSPFv3, multicast, RIPv2, and filters).
IPSec Tunnel Management
Palo Alto Networks firewalls terminate IPSec tunnels and inspect tunneled traffic
GlobalProtect™ Management
Palo Alto Networks firewalls secure mobile workforces by specifying algorithms for authentication and encryption in VPN tunnels between a GlobalProtect gateway module and client.
GRE Tunnel Management
Palo Alto Networks firewalls terminate generic routing encapsulation (GRE) tunnels and inspect tunneled traffic.
SD-WAN Link Management
Palo Alto Networks firewalls bind multiple WAN connections (ADSL/DSL, cable modem, Ethernet, fiber optic, LTE/3G/4G/5G, MPLS, microwave/radio, satellite, Wi-Fi) to a virtual interface and support dynamic, intelligent path selection based on applications and services and the conditions of links that each application or service is allowed to use.
Identity Services
Description
Native Policy Management (Rulestacks)
Panorama Policy Management (Cloud Device Groups)
Strata Cloud Manager (SCM) Policy Management
User-ID based policies
User-ID™, a standard feature on the Palo Alto Networks firewall, enables you to author user- and group-based policies. User-ID provides many mechanisms to collect this User Mapping information. For example, the User-ID agent monitors server logs for login events and listens for syslog messages from authenticating services. leverage user information stored in a wide range of repositories.
N/A
Supported methods:
  • TS Agent
  • Agentless with winrm-https
Panorama/Firewall based data redirection
You can congfigure some firewalls to collect user-ID mapping information from various sources and then redistribute them to other firewalls such as Cloud NGFWs.
Cloud Identity Engine (CIE) Directory SyncCloud Identity Engine (Directory Sync) allows Palo Alto Networks Firewalls to access your Active Directory information, so that you can easily set up and manage security and decryption policies for users and groups.
Cloud Identity Engine (CIE) based Identity Redistribution
Cloud Identity Engine (User Context) collects and distributes IP address-to-user name mappings, IP port to username mappings, user tags IP address tags, Host IDs, and quarantine list information to Palo Alto Networks firewalls.