Hello, and welcome to Identification, Authentication,
and Access Control with pfSense.
My name is Joe Abraham,
and in this course, we're going to see how you can secure
your network better by using pfSense.
PfSense is a tool that was created to be a free network firewall
distribution that can expand its capabilities through packages and
is great at helping us stop threats by blocking communications
based on configured rule sets.
It helps us reduce some of the artificial limitations of common commercial
products, and with the packages that we can install,
it can have many of the same features of other
enterprise next‑gen firewall products today.
It was created by its founders around 2004 and it was first released in 2006.
Have I mentioned that pfSense is a free firewall distribution? It requires
absolutely no Unix or CLI knowledge to be able to operate it.
It can be downloaded here at pfsense.org.
And not only is it open source, but the packages are as well, meaning we can
freely expand its capabilities to doing things like providing DNS or DHCP
services to network monitoring and IPS capabilities.
We'll be exploring a little bit of these expanded capabilities in
this course. If we look at the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, which
shows five different functions, we can say that pfSense is mostly in
line with at least two of them.
The first one would be Protect, because it helps us block
traffic that we don't want in our networks and helps us secure
additional services and communications.
The other one is Detect, since we're using it to monitor the network for
potential threats. For the purposes of this course, we'll be focusing on
Protect. A lot of the functionality of pfSense,
at least at its core, centers around data security and protective technology.
If we add on some integrations and user‑based
services like VPN and authentication, it can cover identity management,
authentication, and access control, like we're set up to here.
If we look at access control as the example,
pfSense will help make sure that you cover PR.AC‑3 and
PR.AC‑5 in the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.
Remote access will be managed, and we'll make sure that network
integrity is protected after we're done here as well.
We'll get these accomplished by configuring network
segmentation within the firewall,
restricting specific services using the rules, and
authenticating remote access VPN users with our backend
Active Directory system. To get started,
we'll need to get pfSense installed and set up with an initial configuration.
Let's get into it.