: Building Blocks of Security Zones
Focus
Focus

Building Blocks of Security Zones

Table of Contents

Building Blocks of Security Zones

To define a security zone, click
Add
and specify the following information.
Security Zone Settings
Description
Name
Enter a zone name (up to 31 characters). This name appears in the list of zones when defining security policies and configuring interfaces. The name is case-sensitive and must be unique within the virtual router. Use only letters, numbers, spaces, hyphens, periods, and underscores.
Location
This field is present only if the firewall supports multiple virtual systems (vsys) and that capability is enabled. Select the vsys to which this zone applies.
Type
Select a zone type (
Tap
,
Virtual Wire
,
Layer2
,
Layer3
,
External
, or
Tunnel
) to view all the
Interfaces
of that type that have not been assigned to a zone. The Layer 2 and Layer 3 zone types list all Ethernet interfaces and subinterfaces of that type.
Add
the interfaces that you want to assign to the zone.
The External zone is used to control traffic between multiple virtual systems on a single firewall. It displays only on firewalls that support multiple virtual systems and only if the
Multi Virtual System Capability
is enabled. For information on external zones see,Inter-VSYS Traffic That Remains Within the Firewall.
An interface can belong to only one zone in one virtual system.
Interfaces
Add one or more interfaces to this zone.
Zone Protection Profiles
Select a profile that specifies how the firewall responds to attacks from this zone. To create a new profile, see Network > Network Profiles > Zone Protection. The best practice is to defend each zone with Zone Protection profile.
Enable Packet Buffer Protection
Configure Packet Buffer Protection (Device > Setup > Session) globally and apply it to each zone. The firewall applies Packet Buffer Protection to the ingress zone only. Packet Buffer Protection based on buffer utilization percentage is enabled by default. An alternative is to configure Packet Buffer Protection based on latency. It is a best practice to enable Packet Buffer Protection on each zone to protect the firewall buffers.
Log Setting
Select a Log Forwarding profile for forwarding zone protection logs to an external system.
If you have a Log Forwarding profile named default, that profile will be automatically selected for this drop-down when defining a new security zone. You can override this default setting at any time by continuing to select a different Log Forwarding profile when setting up a new security zone. To define or add a new Log Forwarding profile (and to name a profile default so that this drop-down is populated automatically), click
New
(refer to Objects > Log Forwarding).
If you are configuring the zone in a Panorama template, the
Log Setting
drop-down lists only shared Log Forwarding profiles; to specify a non-shared profile, you must type its name.
Enable User Identification
If you configured User-ID™ to perform IP address-to-username mapping (discovery), the best practice is to
Enable User Identification
to apply the mapping information to traffic in this zone. If you disable this option, firewall logs, reports, and policies will exclude user mapping information for traffic within the zone.
By default, if you select this option, the firewall applies user mapping information to the traffic of all subnetworks in the zone. To limit the information to specific subnetworks within the zone, use the
Include List
and
Exclude List
.
Enable User-ID on trusted zones only. If you enable User-ID and client probing on an external untrusted zone (such as the internet), probes could be sent outside your protected network, resulting in an information disclosure of the User-ID agent service account name, domain name, and encrypted password hash, which could allow an attacker to gain unauthorized access to protected resources.
User-ID performs discovery for the zone only if it falls within the network range that User-ID monitors. If the zone is outside that range, the firewall does not apply user mapping information to the zone traffic even if you select
Enable User Identification
. For details, see Include or Exclude Subnetworks for User Mapping.
User Identification ACL Include List
By default, if you do not specify subnetworks in this list, the firewall applies the user mapping information it discovers to all the traffic of this zone for use in logs, reports, and policies.
To limit the application of user mapping information to specific subnetworks within the zone, then for each subnetwork click
Add
and select an address (or address group) object or type the IP address range (for example, 10.1.1.1/24). The exclusion of all other subnetworks is implicit because the
Include List
is an allow list, so you do not need to add them to the
Exclude List
.
Add entries to the
Exclude List
only to exclude user mapping information for a subset of the subnetworks in the
Include List
. For example, if you add 10.0.0.0/8 to the
Include List
and add 10.2.50.0/22 to the
Exclude List
, the firewall includes user mapping information for all the zone subnetworks of 10.0.0.0/8 except 10.2.50.0/22, and excludes information for all zone subnetworks outside of 10.0.0.0/8.
You can only include subnetworks that fall within the network range that User-ID monitors. For details, see Include or Exclude Subnetworks for User Mapping.
User Identification ACL Exclude List
To exclude user mapping information for a subset of the subnetworks in the
Include List
,
Add
an address (or address group) object or type the IP address range for each subnetwork to exclude.
If you add entries to the
Exclude List
but not the
Include List
, the firewall excludes user mapping information for all subnetworks within the zone, not just the subnetworks you added.

Recommended For You