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Traffic Redirector: Preventing Lateral Threat Movement to Secure Critical Assets

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5 min read

Today, data centers and clouds are sprawling, dynamic environments where a single workload breach can lead to a catastrophic lateral spread. Micro-segmentation, creating secure zones around individual applications and workloads, is needed in modern data centers to limit the spread of a breach and protect your most critical assets. In addition to zone-based segmentation, it is imperative to protect our most critical assets with intra-subnet / intra-VLAN workload segmentation. If one workload in a zone is compromised, the entire segment can be at risk. We need to evolve our strategy by adding secure micro-segmentation for critical assets on top of broad network segmentation implemented via Dynamic Address Group policies.

The East-West Security Gap: Why Traditional Micro-segmentation Falls Short

Lateral movement is how attackers escalate a minor intrusion into a major incident, moving from an initial point of compromise to find and exploit high-value assets within the same security zone. While micro-segmentation is the accepted strategy to prevent this, traditional approaches often fail due to complexity, hypervisor lock-in, and a critical lack of deep, Layer 7 visibility. These tools may filter traffic by port and protocol but remain blind to threats within allowed application traffic, creating a false sense of security as attackers move undetected across the network.

Introducing Palo Alto Networks Traffic Redirector

Available within Palo Alto Networks Software Firewalls, Traffic Redirector is engineered to overcome the common challenges of traditional micro-segmentation. Powered by the just-announced PAN-OS 12.1 Orion operating system, our software firewalls provide the advanced threat prevention required for deep east-west traffic inspection. It provides a precise and scalable approach to protect your most valuable assets without the complexity of an environment-wide deployment. By using a lightweight module with no hypervisor dependency, Traffic Redirector offers the flexibility needed for modern, hybrid environments. Most importantly, it delivers the deep Layer 7 inspection required to find and block threats within east-west traffic, closing the visibility gaps left by port-based filtering tools.

Traffic Redirector is built around three core capabilities:

Targeted Redirection: A lightweight panredirect module is installed on the specific workloads you want to secure. This module is designed to have no hypervisor dependency, making it a flexible solution.
East-West Inspection: The module redirects all traffic to and from the secured workload to your Palo Alto Networks next-generation firewall (NGFW) for inspection. This is done transparently via a GENEVE tunnel, an industry-standard protocol that encapsulates traffic to send it for deep inspection without requiring network changes. This process provides deep Layer 7 inspection for all East-West traffic.
Granular Control: You can control precisely which workloads' traffic is redirected and inspected, giving you the flexibility to secure critical assets without impacting the entire environment.

Direct Benefits: Strengthen Your Security Posture and Streamline Operations

Implementing Traffic Redirector delivers strategic benefits that strengthen your security posture and streamline operations. It directly reduces risk by inspecting all traffic to and from critical assets, which prevents lateral threat spread and provides the granular controls needed to maintain compliance. Operationally, it provides a consistent security policy across hybrid environments and delivers the deep visibility required to build and enforce effective security rules. It allows security teams to:

Contain Breaches by Preventing Lateral Movement: By inspecting all traffic to and from designated applications and workloads, threats are stopped from moving laterally, effectively containing a breach to the initial point of compromise.
Enable and Simplify Compliance: Provides the deep inspection and granular control required by mandates such as PCI, NIST, and HIPAA, simplifying the process of protecting sensitive data and intellectual property.
Maintain a Consistent Security Posture: Applies a uniform security policy for critical assets across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, ensuring protection is consistent regardless of the underlying infrastructure.
Enhance Security Policy with Deep Visibility: Delivers full visibility into application-to-application traffic, providing the crucial data in firewall and threat logs to build, validate, and enforce effective security policies.

Implementing a dynamic and precise defense with Traffic Redirector is a critical step in moving beyond outdated, static security models. This targeted approach to microsegmentation becomes even more powerful when integrated with a scalable security architecture for the entire data center.

Traffic Redirector with HSF: Precision Micro-segmentation at Hyperscale

In large private data centers, securing east-west traffic presents a significant challenge for both capacity planning and threat inspection. While north-south traffic is often predictable, the dynamic and high-volume nature of internal traffic requires a security architecture that is both precise and highly elastic.

To address this, Palo Alto Networks provides a unified solution by integrating the capabilities of Traffic Redirector and the Hyperscale Security Fabric (HSF). This combination delivers granular micro-segmentation at a scale previously difficult to achieve.

The solution operates as a seamless workflow. The Traffic Redirector module is deployed on critical workloads to precisely direct their east-west traffic to the Prisma AIRS platform for inspection. This traffic is then managed by the Hyperscale Security Fabric, which automatically scales firewall resources to meet demand. Using available compute and Software NGFW credits, HSF can elastically deploy additional dataplanes to handle traffic bursts and then scale them back in as demand subsides.

This automated scalability ensures security performance keeps pace with unpredictable east-west traffic patterns, eliminating the risk of security bottlenecks and the cost of overprovisioning. Ultimately, it makes your security as agile as your data center.

What’s next?

Learn where Traffic Redirector may be best used in your cloud deployments by understanding the true risk profile of your entire multicloud environment with Cloud Network and AI Risk Assessment (CLARA).