: Secure Boot Support for VM-Series on GCP
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Secure Boot Support for VM-Series on GCP

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Secure Boot Support for VM-Series on GCP

Learn to enable secure boot support for VM-Series on GCP.
Secure Boot for VM-Series firewalls enhances your security posture by ensuring the integrity of the boot process. Secure Boot verifies that only trusted software components are loaded during startup, protecting against malicious code injection and unauthorized modifications to the boot sequence. Secure Boot leverages the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) and a chain of trust established through cryptographic signatures. It prevents rootkits, bootkits, low-level attacks, ensures boot integrity, and provides confidence in the authenticity of your VM-Series instances across your cloud environment.
Prerequisites
PAN-OS Version 12.1 or later
  • Secure boot support is available only for fresh installations of VM-Series with PAN-OS version 12.1 or later. Secure boot will not be enabled for upgraded VM-Series models.
  • Make sure to enable UEFI boot mode when creating the GCP instance.
  • Secure Boot is enabled by default on GCP when explicitly turned on during instance creation.
  • If you want to downgrade your VM-Series firewall, you must disable Secure Boot in the GCP Console and then restart the VM-instance before you begin the downgrade.

Enable UEFI boot mode and Secure Boot Support for VM-Series on GCP

Perform the following steps to enable UEFI boot mode and secure boot support for VM-Series on GCP:
  1. From the GCP console, select Compute Engine > VM instances.
  2. In the Boot Disk Settings section, select an VM-Series image that supports UEFI and Secure Boot.
  3. Go to the Security and Access section, enable the following options:
    • Secure Boot
    • vTPM (Virtual Trusted Platform Module)
    • Integrity Monitoring
To verify the secure boot support on your VM-Series instance on GCP, SSH into the Command Line Interface (CLI) of the VMSeries firewall and run the following command:
show system secure-boot status