PANdora’s Box: Vulnerabilities Found in NGFW eclypsium.com/blog/pand…

Security appliances, such as firewalls, VPNs, and secure web gateways, are designed to protect organizations from cyber threats.

The issue is that security appliances, ironically, are often very poor regarding their own supply chain security and device integrity.

Our latest research has found that these problems extend to Palo Alto Networks devices. We purchased multiple Palo Alto Networks security appliances, expecting a high level of security and resilience. Instead, what we found under the hood was commodity hardware, vulnerable software and firmware, and missing security features.

These weren’t obscure, corner-case vulnerabilities. Instead these were very well-known issues that we wouldn’t expect to see even on a consumer-grade laptop. These issues could allow attackers to evade even the most basic integrity protections, such as Secure Boot, and modify device firmware if exploited.