Free Paloalto Networks NGFW-Engineer Practice Exam with Questions & Answers

To meet the requirement of data isolation for different regional business units while minimizing administrative overhead, the best approach is to establish separate Cloud Identity Engine (CIE) tenants for each business unit. Each tenant would be integrated with the relevant identity sources (such as on-premises AD, Azure AD, and Okta) for that specific region. This ensures that the identity data for each region is kept isolated and only relevant user and group data is distributed to the respective regional firewalls.

By maintaining a strict one-to-one mapping between CIE tenants and business units, the organization ensures that each region’s firewall only receives the user and group data relevant to that region, thus meeting data sovereignty requirements and minimizing administrative complexity.

In this scenario, the customer requires that users do not directly access websites and that a security device (the firewall) manages the connection, while also ensuring that there is authentication back to the Active Directory (AD) servers for all sessions. The explicit proxy with Kerberos authentication is the best solution because:

The explicit proxy allows the firewall to intercept user web traffic and manage the connections on behalf of users.

Kerberos authentication ensures that the user’s identity is validated against the Active Directory servers before the session is allowed, fulfilling the authentication requirement.

In the context of GlobalProtect with certificate-based authentication, certificate profiles are used to ensure proper validation of the certificates. They perform the following functions:

Define trust anchors, which are the root and intermediate Certificate Authorities (CAs) that the firewall trusts to authenticate certificates.

Specify revocation checks, such as CRL (Certificate Revocation List) and OCSP (Online Certificate Status Protocol), to ensure that the certificates being used have not been revoked.

Map certificate attributes, such as the Common Name (CN), which helps in authenticating users and devices based on their certificates.

The maximum number of Log Collectors that can be added to a Log Collector Group is 18 plus 2 hot spares, ensuring redundancy and availability in case of failure. This allows for a total of up to 20 Log Collectors in a group, providing sufficient scalability and reliability for log collection.

In the context of a Zone Protection profile, Protocol Protection is the section used to configure protections against activities such as spoofed IP addresses and split handshake session establishment attempts. These types of attacks typically involve manipulating protocol behaviors, such as IP address spoofing or session hijacking, and are mitigated by the Protocol Protection settings.

When configuring link monitoring for high availability (HA) on a Palo Alto Networks NGFW, the following interface types are supported:

Virtual Wire: Used when you have a transparent mode firewall deployment, where the firewall operates at Layer 2 to monitor traffic between two network segments.

Layer 2: Also used in transparent mode, where the firewall operates as a Layer 2 device and can be configured for link monitoring.

Layer 3: Used in routed mode, where the firewall is involved in routing traffic and can also be configured to monitor links.

Terraform is an Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tool that automates the provisioning and management of infrastructure resources, including Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs). By using Terraform configuration files, administrators can define and deploy NGFW instances across cloud environments (such as AWS, Azure, and GCP) efficiently and consistently.

Terraform enables:

Automated firewall deployment in cloud environments.

Configuration of security policies and networking settings in a declarative manner.

Scalability and repeatability, reducing manual intervention in firewall provisioning.

When the preemptive hold time is set to 0 minutes in route monitoring, the firewall is configured to immediately reinstall the route into the Routing Information Base (RIB) as soon as the monitored path comes up. This essentially means that the firewall will not wait for any predefined hold time before reestablishing the route once the monitoring condition is met, ensuring a faster recovery of the route.

In a Multi-VSYS (Virtual System) architecture, Palo Alto Networks firewalls require a specific logical construct to facilitate communication that stays within the physical device. While traditional Layer 3 zones must be bound to physical interfaces, sub-interfaces, or aggregate groups,inter-VSYS communicationrelies on a specialized zone configuration known as theExternalzone type.

When traffic is routed between virtual routers using the next-vr command, the firewall needs a logical "hand-off" point to pass the session from one VSYS context to another. To achieve this, an engineer must create a zone in each VSYS and explicitly set itsType to External. These External zones do not attach to physical ports; instead, they serve as the entry and exit points for the internal backplane.

If the engineer attempts to use a standard Layer 3 zone for this purpose without an associated physical interface, the traffic will fail to egress the source VSYS or ingress the destination VSYS. Even if theSecurity PolicyandVirtual Routersettings are technically accurate, the session cannot be established because the logical path is incomplete. Therefore, assigning theExternal zone typeis a mandatory architectural requirement to bridge the gap between two logically separated virtual systems within the same hardware chassis.