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Palo Alto NGFW lab 3 of 30

Administrators, roles and authentication

Give three people the access they need and no more: a read-only auditor, a policy administrator with a custom role, and an operations engineer who signs in through an authentication profile and sequence. Add password complexity, a password-expiry profile, lockout and idle timeout, then prove each account's rights through the XML API.

Run this lab

It needs Lite: its 2 nodes are set to 3 vCPU and 6,656 MB in total. That fits the free demo too.

In your workspace: Shared, then Palo Alto NGFW PAN-OS 11 guided labs, then 03 - Administrators roles and authentication

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Level
Intermediate
Time
About 50 minutes
Nodes need
3 vCPU, 6,656 MB
Smallest plan
Lite

The scenario

Until now everyone at Calder has used the shared admin account. The auditors have rejected that: every change must be traceable to a person, and nobody should have more rights than their job needs. You'll set up three named administrators:

PersonJobAccountRights
Asha (internal audit)reviews configurationauditor / Audit-Access-2read everything, change nothing
Polly (security team)maintains rules and objectspolly / Policy-Access-3edit Policies and Objects, view Network, no Device settings, no API
Omar (operations)runs the box day to dayops1 / Ops-Access-4device administrator, password checked by an authentication profile

Keep using admin / Lab-Access-1 to do the configuration. Test the new accounts from Client-PC.

Before you start. Start all the nodes. The firewall takes 6-8 minutes to boot and comes up with this lab's starting configuration already loaded. Wait until the FW1 console shows FW1 login:, then log in as admin / Lab-Access-1. Until the management plane is ready it answers Login incorrect, even with the right password. The Linux hosts are ready within seconds.

What you’ll practise

  • Enforce password complexity and a password-expiry profile
  • Create administrators with dynamic roles (superreader, device administrator)
  • Build a custom Admin Role Profile and assign it
  • Authenticate an administrator through an authentication profile and sequence backed by the local user database
  • Set lockout and idle timeout, and test each account's rights

The tasks

  1. Password rules for every local administrator
  2. A read-only auditor with a dynamic role
  3. A custom Admin Role Profile for the policy administrator
  4. Authenticate an operator through a profile and a sequence
  5. Lockout and idle timeout for all administrators
  6. Prove each account's rights through the API

The Lab Tasks pane has the scenario, these tasks, the checks to run, hints and the full solution.

Topology and devices

The network as it opens in EVE-NG, drawn from the lab’s own canvas, and the image each node runs.

Topology of Administrators roles and authentication2 nodes and 1 network, 2 links. Every link is listed as text below the diagram.FW1Client-PCInsidemgmteth0
2 nodes and 1 network, with the interface names each link uses.
Every link, as text
  • FW1 mgmt to Inside (network)
  • Client-PC eth0 to Inside (network)
Nodes in Administrators, roles and authentication, with the image each runs and the vCPU and RAM it’s set to
NodeDeviceImage in Add NodeSet to
FW1Palo Alto Networks VM-Series (PAN-OS)paloalto-11.2.52 vCPU, 5,632 MB
Client-PCEVE-NG GUI server (Docker)eve-gui-server:latest1 vCPU, 1,024 MB

How to open this lab

  1. Sign in to your workspace at lab.cloudlabbox.com.

  2. In File Manager, open Shared, then the folder Palo Alto NGFW PAN-OS 11 guided labs.

  3. Open 03 - Administrators roles and authentication and start its nodes, then open Lab Tasks for the scenario and the steps.

The lab is read-only. You can start the nodes and configure the devices, but changes to the topology can’t be saved. To change it, rebuild it in your own folder.

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CloudLabBox is independent of Palo Alto Networks and Cisco. The lab follows exam topics and isn’t vendor training material; vendor names identify the exams and the images in the workspace.