Support for Brotli Decompression
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What's New in the NetSec Platform

Support for Brotli Decompression

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Support for Brotli Decompression

Palo Alto Networks CTD engine used by firewalls now provides support for decompression and decoding of Brotli-encoded HTTP applications and content.
The (CTD) Content-Based Threat Detection engine used by a multitude of Palo Alto Networks platforms now provides support for Brotli decompression for improved analysis and threat detection of HTTP content. Brotli is a high-efficiency data compression format with widespread support that was developed by Google for HTTP web applications and content. Palo Alto Networks Security subscription services, such as Advanced Threat Prevention, Advanced WildFire Advanced URL Filtering, and others rely on the CTD engine to facilitate traffic inspection. With the addition of the Brotli decoder, traffic that was previously dropped, or is otherwise passed through the network as an unsupported content-encoding type, is now processed and available for inspection by various Palo Alto Networks content inspection features. This includes, but is not limited to Precision AI™ optimized features such as Advanced WildFire: Inline Cloud Analysis, Advanced Threat Prevention: Inline Cloud Analysis, and Inline Deep Learning Analysis for Advanced URL Filtering; but also includes any HTTP traffic payloads processed by a configured and enabled security policy. This allows for broader visibility into traffic and helps protect against attackers using Brotli compression to bypass traditional security mechanisms. When enabled, this software-based Brotli library is integrated into the existing content decoder framework. Due to the expected increases in traffic inspection, the firewall requires additional resources to enable the feature; and as a result, is only available on select platforms.