GRE support over the PAN-OS cellular interface enables you to establish GRE tunnels using cellular connections on next-generation firewalls. This feature allows you to configure GRE tunnels with dynamic IP addressing, supporting IPv4 for tunnel endpoints and traffic. You can use this capability to securely connect remote IoT devices, such as video cameras and sensors, back to a mobile headend over cellular networks.

A GRE tunnel over a cellular interface is particularly useful for large service providers looking to extend their routing infrastructure while minimizing operational expenses. By supporting dynamic addressing, it accommodates scenarios where IP addresses may change, providing flexibility in mobile and cellular environments. This GRE over cellular solution allows you to deploy NGFWs in locations without traditional Ethernet connectivity, making it ideal for government, industrial, and remote site applications where secure, reliable communication over cellular networks is essential.

For high-performance environments such as headquarters, large enterprises, and data centers, PAN-OS 12.1 solves the challenge of supporting high-traffic proxy solutions with its support for the PA-5450 firewall. This enhancement leverages the PA-5450's multi-CPU chassis to deliver significant improvements in performance and scalability. This update ensures that users requiring proxy solutions benefit from the enhanced capabilities of secure web gateway (SWG).

IPv6 support for IP geolocation supplements the existing IPv4 geolocation support for country-based Security, Decryption, and DoS Protection policies by providing visibility and control in dual-stack and IPv6-only environments using your current security policy rules with a single global switch. This unified approach simplifies policy management and ensures consistent security enforcement across both IPv4 and IPv6 networks. This addresses the growing adoption of IPv6 by ISPs and other large enterprise organizations as well as customers who are required to phase out IPv4 and implement IPv6 as part of a larger migration process.

To ensure up-to-date geolocation data, Palo Alto Networks provides a regularly updated global content file which includes an IPv4/IPv6 to country mapping database to determine the ownership of a given IP space. The IP to geolocation mapping for IPv6 addresses is supported with the same level of granularity and coverage as for IPv4 addresses, ensuring consistent policy enforcement across both address types. Alternatively, you can create your own custom mappings by providing a range of IPv6 addresses to a specified region; these have precedence over the default mapping and can be used to fine-tune your security policies.

Additionally, IPv6 support for IP Geolocation integrates seamlessly with existing Palo Alto Networks logging and monitoring tools. Source and destination countries are displayed in logs for IPv6 traffic, and you can filter logs by source or destination country to include IPv6 traffic. All ACC widgets that display source or destination country information now count IPv6 traffic as well.

PAN-OS uses deep packet inspection (DPI) to generate enhanced application logs (EAL) from ICMPv6 neighbor discovery protocol (NDP) packets. With ICMPv6 EAL, Device Security can learn about devices and device attributes and support Advanced Device-ID for IPv6 deployments. Cortex XDR can also use ICMPv6 EALs from PAN-OS.

EALs for ICMPv6 NDP is enabled by default. To prevent log flooding from ICMPv6 deployments, you can disable ICMPv6 EAL using the CLI. When disabling ICMPv6 EAL, commit the device config for the change to take effect.

set deviceconfig setting logging enhanced-application-logging disable-global icmpv6-ndp

If you disable ICMPv6 EAL, you can reenable it using the CLI. Commit the device config for the change to take effect.

delete deviceconfig setting logging enhanced-application-logging disable-global icmpv6-ndp

You can now use range filters when you take custom packet captures (PCAPs). You can use range filters to address the challenges of troubleshooting batch traffic issues in environments where the exact source IP addresses, ports, and protocols are not known. While setting capture filters, you can set a range of values separated by dash delimiters for IP addresses, ports, and protocols. You can set source and destination IPs with subnet masks or specific IP ranges. Similarly, you can set source and destination port ranges and protocol ranges. You can also mix single-value filters with range filters. The Next-Generation Firewall captures the packets that fall within the defined ranges, including the boundary values, when reaching the data plane.