WEBVTT

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Hello, and welcome to Identification, Authentication,

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and Access Control with pfSense.

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My name is Joe Abraham,

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and in this course, we're going to see how you can secure

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your network better by using pfSense.

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PfSense is a tool that was created to be a free network firewall

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distribution that can expand its capabilities through packages and

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is great at helping us stop threats by blocking communications

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based on configured rule sets.

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It helps us reduce some of the artificial limitations of common commercial

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products, and with the packages that we can install,

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it can have many of the same features of other

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enterprise next‑gen firewall products today.

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It was created by its founders around 2004 and it was first released in 2006.

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Have I mentioned that pfSense is a free firewall distribution? It requires

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absolutely no Unix or CLI knowledge to be able to operate it.

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It can be downloaded here at pfsense.org.

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And not only is it open source, but the packages are as well, meaning we can

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freely expand its capabilities to doing things like providing DNS or DHCP

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services to network monitoring and IPS capabilities.

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We'll be exploring a little bit of these expanded capabilities in

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this course. If we look at the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, which

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shows five different functions, we can say that pfSense is mostly in

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line with at least two of them.

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The first one would be Protect, because it helps us block

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traffic that we don't want in our networks and helps us secure

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additional services and communications.

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The other one is Detect, since we're using it to monitor the network for

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potential threats. For the purposes of this course, we'll be focusing on

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Protect. A lot of the functionality of pfSense,

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at least at its core, centers around data security and protective technology.

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If we add on some integrations and user‑based

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services like VPN and authentication, it can cover identity management,

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authentication, and access control, like we're set up to here.

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If we look at access control as the example,

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pfSense will help make sure that you cover PR.AC‑3 and

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PR.AC‑5 in the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.

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Remote access will be managed, and we'll make sure that network

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integrity is protected after we're done here as well.

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We'll get these accomplished by configuring network

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segmentation within the firewall,

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restricting specific services using the rules, and

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authenticating remote access VPN users with our backend

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Active Directory system. To get started,

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we'll need to get pfSense installed and set up with an initial configuration.

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Let's get into it.