More than 6 years ago (!) I published a tutorial on how to set up an IPsec VPN tunnel between a Palo Alto Networks firewall and a Cisco ASA. As time flies by, ASA is now able to terminate route-based VPN tunnels (which is great!), we have IKEv2 running everywhere and enhanced security proposals. Hence, it’s time for an update:
Continue reading Route-Based VPN Tunnel Palo Alto <-> Cisco ASA
The NTP Pool is a volunteer organization that provides time synchronization service to hundreds of millions of computers worldwide. A typical client might query a particular NTP Pool server ~10-60 times/hour. Wikipedia lists some abusive clients that far exceeded the normal rate. This wastes NTP server resources, may interfere with other clients, and can trigger DDoS protections. In late 2019, a software update made some FortiGate firewalls very unfriendly to the NTP Pool.
Continue reading FortiGate bug: firewalls sending excessive requests to the NTP Pool
This is a really nice feature: you can run iperf3 directly on a FortiGate to speed-test your network connections. It’s basically an iperf3 client. Using some public iperf servers you can test your Internet bandwidth; using some internal servers you can test your own routed/switched networks, VPNs, etc. However, the maximum throughput for the test is CPU dependent. So please be careful when interpreting the results. Here we go:
Uh, I wasn’t aware of so many different printing protocols. Do you? While I was trying to solve a little printing problem I took a packet capture of three different printing variants over TCP/IP: Raw via TCP port 9100, LPD/LPR via TCP port 515, and Apple’s AirPrint which uses the Internet Printing Protocol IPP. As always, you can download this pcap and have a look at it by yourself.
Since PAN-OS version 9.0 you can configure GRE tunnels on a Palo Alto Networks firewall. Greetings from the clouds. As always, this is done solely through the GUI while you can use some CLI commands to test the tunnel. This time Palo put a little stumbling block in there as you have to allow a GRE connection with a certain zone/IP reference. I will show how to set up such a GRE tunnel between a Palo and a Cisco router. Here we go:
As you might have noticed, I am playing a lot with NTP these days. Having a networking background I also like Power over Ethernet. So what’s more obvious than using a PoE-powered NTP display for test purposes? ;D
This is a guest blogpost by Martin Langer, Ph.D. student for “Secured Time Synchronization Using Packet-Based Time Protocols” at Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences, Germany.
In the previous posts, I already introduced the Network Time Security (NTS) protocol and described the most important features. Although the specification process has not been completed, there are already some independent NTS implementations and public time servers (IETF106). NTPsec is one of the important representatives of this series and already offers an advanced NTS solution. In this post, I’ll give you a short guide to setting up an NTS-secured NTP client/server with NTPsec.
This is a guest blogpost by Erik Hjelmvik, an expert in network forensics and network security monitoring at NETRESEC.
Wireshark is the default goto tool for analyzing captured network traffic for most network engineers. But there are a few other free and open source alternatives that are sometimes overlooked, one of which is NetworkMiner (disclaimer: I’m the creator of NetworkMiner).
Monitoring a Meinberg LANTIME appliance is much easier than monitoring DIY NTP servers. Why? Because you can use the provided enterprise MIB and load it into your SNMP-based monitoring system. Great. The MIB serves many OIDs such as the firmware version, reference clock state, offset, client requests, and even more specific ones such as “correlation” and “field strength” in case of my phase-modulated DCF77 receiver (which is called “PZF” by Meinberg). And since the LANTIME is built upon Linux, you can use the well-known system and interfaces MIBs as well for basic coverage. Let’s dig into it:
During my work with a couple of NTP servers, I had many situations in which I just wanted to know whether an NTP server is up and running or not. For this purpose, I used two small Linux tools that fulfil almost the same: single CLI command while not actually updating any clock but only displaying the result. That is: ntpdate & sntp. Of course, the usage of IPv6 is mandatory as well as the possibility to test NTP authentication.
This is a list of missing features for the next-generation firewall from Palo Alto Networks from my point of view (though I have not that many compared to other vendors such as Fortinet). Let’s see whether some of them will find their way into PAN-OS in the next years…
Yes, I know I know, the Juniper ScreenOS devices are Out-of-Everything (OoE), but I am still using them for a couple of labs. They simply work as a router and VPN gateway as well as a port-based firewall. Perfect for labs.
For some reasons I had another lab without native IPv6 Internet. Hence I used the IPv6 Tunnel Broker one more time. Quite easy with the SSGs, since HE offers a sample config. But even through the GUI it’s just a few steps:
Of course, you should use dual-stack networks for almost everything on the Internet. Or even better: IPv6-only with DNS64/NAT64 and so on. ;) Unfortunately, still not every site has native IPv6 support. However, we can simply use the IPv6 Tunnel Broker from Hurricane Electric to overcome this time-based issue.
Well, wait… Not when using a Palo Alto Networks firewall which lacks 6in4 tunnel support. Sigh. Here’s my workaround:
Continue reading Workaround for Not Using a Palo Alto with a 6in4 Tunnel
For some reason, I am currently using a FortiGate on a location that has no native IPv6 support. Uh, I don’t want to talk about that. ;) However, at least the FortiGate firewalls are capable of 6in4 tunnels. Hence I am using the IPv6 Tunnel Broker from Hurricane Electric again. Quite easy so far.
But note, as always: Though FortiGate supports these IPv6 features such as a 6in4 tunnel or stateful/-less DHCPv6 server, those features are NOT stable or well designed at all. I had many bugs and outages during my last years. Having “NAT enabled” on every new IPv6 policy is ridiculous. Furthermore, having independent security policies for legacy IP and IPv6 is obviously a really bad design. One single policy responsible for both Internet protocols is a MUST. Anyway, let’s look at the 6in4 tunnel:
One of my readers sent me this question:
Let’s have a look: